And:Reboot
by Silentz
Summary: I have a condition. I’m going to forget everything. I’m going to forget you. And there’s nothing you can do about it. NaruGaara. Yaoi. AU. 3-Part-fic. Sequel included.
1. Part 1 of 3

Summary: I have a condition. I'm going to forget everything. I'm going to forget you. And there's nothing you can do about it. NaruGaara. Yaoi. AU.

((**08/23/10**: Story has been editted. Nothing major. Just fixed the hilarious amount of inconsistencies, spelling and grammatical errors that were somehow still present, as well as added a link to an editted (less explicit) version of Part 3 for both A:R and SBM.))

Author's Note: I didn't know exactly how to characterize this story. It's a little bit of angst, a tad of hurt/comfort, a teensy bit of a tragedy, a lot of a romance story, but most of all, it's a discovery of feelings story. That's really all you should know before/if you decide to read it. Thank you.

* * *

**/And:Reboot**

One day, Naruto rode a bicycle to school. When I asked why, he said it was because he had crashed his car. When I asked how, he said with a laugh that he had forgotten how to drive it. Of course, I didn't believe him.

He had loved his lemon of a vehicle more than most people, and he took great pains to ensure that no harm came to it. He drove ten—sometimes fifteen miles under the speed limit and parked as far away as possible from other cars. This infuriated me whenever we carpooled, but I found a certain amusement in it nevertheless. Such eccentricities possessed a magnetic charm, making him who he was. Still, I knew that car would last forever. He had to be lying. But I never saw it again. The day he showed me the damage report, I was in utter disbelief.

Needless to say, I started paying more attention.

**/And:Start**

"Where on earth did I put them?"

I glanced up from my Russian Studies textbook in time to see Naruto pat himself down in confusion. He turned toward me, blue eyes alive with uncertainty, and cocked his head a little to the side. "Do you know where I put my keys?"

"Your apartment keys?" I asked casually.

"No," he scratched his head, golden tufts going awry for a few moments, before he crossed his arms and looked around again. "My car keys."

A crease settled itself on my forehead as I stared at him for a small span of time. "You totaled your car."

Naruto paused, looking at me again with a puzzled expression—like he didn't quite believe me—before slapping his forehead and grinning. "You're right; I'm stupid. It's an old habit." Grabbing his books off the counter, he pushed a burnt piece of toast into his mouth and was out the door with a rushed goodbye. Without his car, he would undoubtedly be late, but he had politely declined when I offered to let him drive mine, so it was his own fault. It wasn't my concern, anyway.

We were roommates, and had been for two-and-a-half years now. My freshman year of college, I had decided to go random in the hopes that I would be paired with someone I could simply ignore. It was always easier to stay away from someone if I didn't already know them, and my brother and sister weren't too keen on using the money father left us to pay for a single. What I really wanted was peace and quiet, single or no single. What I got was Naruto, the enthusiastic blond who made it his priority to see that we were friends by the end of the first month.

I told him he was crazy. He told me I was probably right, but we would be friends by the commencement of four weeks. I took my usual route and ignored him. He took his usual route and annoyed the hell out of me by inviting me to go everywhere with him. I tried to scare him off by telling him I was gay. He said he had five other gay friends, so what was one more? And really, in the end, it was useless to resist, because we were lodged together in an eleven-by-seven foot room, and I came home to his smiling face every night. Somewhere along the line, I conceded. I'm pretty sure it was during the fourth week.

Our relationship after that was abnormal at best. He assumed we were friends, and I grew tired of telling him he was wrong. Somewhere else along the line, I agreed to go places with him, if only to shut him up. We were an awkward pair—Naruto was a boy of charismatic appeal and an amicable nature, while I considered myself plain and prided myself on remaining relatively unsociable. And yet, he dragged me everywhere, to the point where we were known for being together, and people questioned us if we went somewhere without one another. What in the world did he see in me? I spent my weekends at the library, immersed in my Historical Studies until I was ready to collapse. Naruto partied from Thursday until sometimes Sunday, collapsing everywhere from the street outside to my lap on some occasions, making it clear that he didn't take his pursued Art Education degree very seriously.

We were so very different.

He dragged a new girl home almost every week. On the off-chance that I actually dared to stop by the apartment with a boy, Naruto would smile and treat him kindly, indiscriminately, and tell him them that I was a keeper. I couldn't tell if he was being serious, but I told him to stop being stupid, nonetheless. And I don't know how, but we got along. Our worlds began to merge together at some point, and the random girl arrivals substantially lessened, along with the wild nights out. Naruto started showing up at the library, to my dismay, and we worked side-by-side. I even agreed to accompany him to places on a very few occasions, but it was enough that the gay community thought I had a thing for him. That was crazy. _They_ were crazy, and I told them so, but they just smiled and told me to stop lying to myself.

As juniors, I really had come to know him quite well, whether I liked it or not. When I went to the library, I subconsciously waited at the door for Naruto to pack his things and come along. When Naruto went out, though these occasions were now few and far between, he assumed I would be joining him and patiently waited for me to get my things together. My stoic, unremitting countenance never changed, and Naruto's bubbly, outgoing temperament remained the same. One could say the _circumstances _had changed, and we had come to accept them. I knew he would be a lifelong friend, even if I hated the idea of friendship. I had a feeling I would know him for the rest of my life. He had somehow come to know almost everything about me. I likewise knew nearly everything about him.

That's why I knew, I just _knew_…From the moment that he had rode the bike to school, I knew that something was wrong.

/

I glimpsed up at Naruto as he bustled into our adopted corner of the library, throwing his books down and bending over to catch his breath. A few people looked up at him and glared, as Naruto never made too much of an effort to be quiet. I couldn't help but admire how he didn't seem to care about what other people thought of him. Of course, I never told him this.

"You're late," I said succinctly, turning my attention back to my note-taking. I made sure my tone communicated that I didn't care but was simply stating fact.

"I'm really sorry about that, Gaara," Naruto said between breaths. Taking his seat beside me, he pulled out a book and hastily flipped to a desired page. "Believe it or not, it slipped my mind."

"There's no need to apologize," I muttered, pen scrawling across my page. "We all forget every once in a while." But what I was saying didn't seem right. Naruto had never ever been late or forgotten. Every Tuesday and Thursday; that was the established agreement. It was February as well, so I couldn't link his confusion with finals or tests. Maybe he simply had a lot on his mind. I looked at Naruto, but he was no longer looking at his textbook. His eyes had drifted off to some place I couldn't see, thoughts emerging in that void I was not permitted access to. He looked troubled. I wanted to ask what was wrong. I wanted to, but didn't.

"Tonight," Naruto spoke up, looking at me again. I maintained my gaze on my books, because I knew that if I looked at him, I would ask him what was wrong. He would then ask _me_ what was wrong in return, because I never inquired as to his possible problems. He used to ask me nearly every day, before he finally realized that I naturally wore an expression of irritation. I don't know why, but I felt uncomfortable asking him such things. I knew that if I did, it would bring us inevitably closer, and I didn't want to get any closer than we already were. I was afraid, deep down, of what it might mean.

"Tonight?" I repeated, turning the next page. I hadn't realized that such a silence had passed between us, but it had. Sometimes, it just happened, but it wasn't uncomfortable. Probably the strangest facet of our relationship was that I never once felt uncomfortable around him. Annoyed, yes, and irritated, yes, definitely, but he never made me feel uneasy. Maybe that was why I didn't mind being around him, even if he was one of the strangest people I had ever met.

"There's a party later tonight," Naruto continued. "Do you wanna come?"

"I can't." Forget the fact that it was Thursday. "I have that big paper due tomorrow." Reaching into my bookbag for more loose-leaf, I continued to address him indirectly. "I thought I had mentioned that."

From the corner of my eye, I watched him pout a bit. "That's right…Well, I'll have to go without you this time. I really need to relieve some tension."

"By drinking?" I questioned skeptically, dropping some paper by my books and fishing out a pen.

"Just enough to forget."

I finally looked at him. I wishd I hadn't. He looked forlorn and depressed and such a drastic opposite of the lighthearted boy I knew. Why did that somehow sadden me, too? "Don't you think forgetting is the problem?" I finally inquired, pulling him once again from that invisible emptiness. His blue eyes met mine, and he smiled, but whether out of habit or for some other reason, I did not know.

"What do you mean?" said Naruto, chin resting neatly in his palm.

I raised a nonexistent brow. "You seem to be forgetting quite a bit lately."

He looked amused. "Have I?"

I glared at him. With one, simple lift of a golden brow, he had issued a silent challenge between us—the _are you going to ask what's wrong with me this time_ game. I did not want to play it tonight. For some inexplicable reason, I felt like more was at stake than usual. This was not some failed quiz or monetary problem. This was something else. I was sure of it. I was also quite sure that a part of me didn't want to know. How fickle the human mind is.

Thankfully, Shikamaru happened to catch sight of us and stopped by, talking more to Naruto than to me, but I was both used to and thankful for that. While they chitchatted, I turned back to my studies, eyes scanning back over the seemingly endless printed texts before me. One of Naruto's cheerful laughs broke out, and I found myself watching him as he shared in an animated conversation with a less-enthused Shikamaru. That was the Naruto I knew…so different from the crystal-blue eyes that had seemed to withhold a secret within their depths just moments prior.

Maybe I didn't really know him at all.

/

Naruto had left the library with Shikamaru not too long after the black-haired student had joined us. Before his departure, he asked me again whether or not I wanted to accompany him, but I declined yet again. I tried my best to disregard his disappointment.

The time alone gave me an ample opportunity to make some major progress on my paper, and before I knew it, I was finished. With my twenty-pager in hand, I walked the short distance from the library to the apartment and was back by 2AM. Not bad, but not good enough to face my Friday in a positive manner. Then again, did I ever face _any_ day of the week in a positive manner?

Shrugging my jacket off onto one of the living room couches, I had tossed my paper onto the kitchen counter and was ready to practically fall into bed when I saw the strange lump on my mattress. I paused in the doorway of our shared bedroom, before exhaling tiredly and trudging up to my bed. Only a few golden strands peeked out from under the blanket, but it was enough for me to know that it was Naruto. Reaching out my hand, I laid it upon where I estimated his shoulder to be and shook him lightly.

"You're in my bed, Naruto," I said quietly, characteristic look of annoyance fighting to win its place across my face. This was not the first time that this had happened. This was not the second time, either. Sometimes when Naruto got very drunk, he would simply mistake my bed for his own. At least I told myself it was a mistake. Sometimes I was even in the bed when it happened, which made for a rather awkward situation, but we always came out of the happenings unaffected, as if it had never transpired. It was more prevalent during our freshman year, and especially during our sophomore year, but ever since Naruto had cut back on his partying and drinking, the occurrences had almost been forgotten. I suppose it was too good to be true.

I shook him again, and this time he shifted beneath the covers and groaned somewhat oddly. Annoyed, I pulled back the covers, and he winced as the moonlight from the nearby window played across his face. He reached out blindly, searching for the coverlet, but he stopped when his hand landed on my arm. His touch was cold. It jolted me to awareness. I watched in a bleary fascination as his eyelids opened slightly, the sapphire of his eyes taking on a glowing quality in the moonlight. It was somewhat beautiful. As his hand slid up my arm a fraction, and his eyes locked with mine, I became cognizant of the potential danger of the situation. It was weird, but whenever Naruto was inebriated and conscious and within so many feet of myself, he was apt to mistake me for a girl. I don't know how his mind processed during these moments, but he had done everything from trying to kiss me, to actually kissing me on one embarrassing occasion, to even attempting to sleep with me, before promptly falling into a deep, intoxicated slumber when he could fight me no more. Thank heavens he usually just conked out until morning, but there were still those rare happenstances in which things almost happened.

It was one of those times.

I tried not to make too sudden a movement, feeling stupidly like a small rodent cornered by a snake. Slowly, I pulled my arm further and further out of his grasp, trying to ignore the small jolts of heat that travelled up my limb. Right when his hand was encircling my wrist, he smiled and pulled me on top of him. He thought this was a game. I knew otherwise and guesstimated that he had roughly five minutes of strength before he passed out again. It would be an extremely long five minutes. I never should have woken him up.

We were a tangle of limbs as I struggled to free myself from his grasp. That only seemed to make things worse, however, as one of the blankets got caught up in the mix, securing me to him at the waist. I tried to roll us off the bed in the hopes that I could knock him out or free myself, at the very least, but that move only worked to his advantage. He rolled on top of me, legs on either side of my own and both of my wrists pinned to the bed on either side of my face. I was going to be kissed again. I glared darkly at him, my face no doubt vivid as a spear of moonlight spilled diagonally across it. Naruto stared at me for a long time, face unreadable, and oddly enough I wanted him to kiss me and get it over with rather than suffer this strange scrutiny that seemed to have no end. When he finally leaned down, I don't know why, but I held my breath. I was not new to kissing, neither was I new to kissing boys. I was not even new to kissing Naruto, but even the idea of it felt strange. I don't think I could ever be ready for such a thing.

As if he could read my thoughts, his lips never reached my own. I felt relieved, and yet, disturbingly let down. His mouth finally made contact with my neck, petal-soft lips dragging slowly across my skin. They seemed to leave an indelible fingerprint wherever they touched, and I realized that this may have been much more dangerous than a simple kiss. When he nipped me gently above my collarbone, I arched into him. I couldn't control it, but his teeth had both tickled and felt oddly good, sending a sudden shiver throughout my smaller frame. Gods above, was I actually _enjoying _this? Before I had a chance to consider this, Naruto pressed an open-mouthed kiss to the very same spot he had playfully bitten, and I felt my body wracked with an alarming shudder as his tongue did tantalizing things to my skin. I closed my eyes and tried to pretend that this was not happening. I tried to imagine it was someone else, but nothing worked. I could imagine no one else but Naruto. Something must have been very wrong with me, because I was perilously close to becoming aroused and that was certainly not a normal reaction to this. Not for _me_, anyway. His lips on my neck deepened their physical assault, causing me to draw in a sharp breath. I found myself wondering who it was that he was imagining I was, but I also didn't want to know. It was a strange contradiction.

The suction on my neck increased, almost painfully so, and I clenched one of my hands, finding the fingers interweaving tightly with Naruto's own slender digits. It scared me, and I opened my eyes. How long had it been since I had been with someone like this? How long had it been since I had even held someone's hand? Why did it have to be Naruto? Why did it have to be me? Our friendship would be ruined after this. While before, such a notion would have greatly relieved me, why now did it so significantly _bother _me?

Who was Naruto thinking about?

Naruto's tongue and lips finally left my skin, but I didn't feel as reassured as I had hoped to. His mouth dragged slowly upward until it finally settled just below my left ear, and he collapsed unconsciously on top of me.

"Gaara," he mumbled incoherently against my skin. My heart seemed to stop as my thoughts registered my own name. It seemed to echo endlessly in my ears, both a blessing and a curse. Why did he not say "Sakura" or "Hinata" or any of the dozens of other girls he had seen in the past? Wasn't he kissing one of them? But he had said my name, so…why had Naruto kissed me as me? That was not how it was supposed to happen. And what in the world would happen now?

My thoughts jumbled together as I fought off sleep. Naruto's deadweight body was still on top of me, useless to try and move, so I could do nothing other than leave him. It was an odd way of looking at it, but he provided warmth, despite the sweet, alcoholic breath that travelled up to my nose every once in a while. Before I knew it, I was drifting off to sleep. I would deal with it all tomorrow, but for now, I at least wanted to acquire a few hours of respite.

I didn't realize it until later, but Naruto never once let go of my hand.

/

When my alarm sounded on my cell-phone later on that morning, I had never felt so horrifically torn from a deep sleep. I shut off my alarm, losing my cell somewhere under the bed, and when I went to push the warm covers off of me, I was delightfully reminded of my roommate's body, which was so gloriously draped on top of me. My alarm had not disturbed him in the least, and neither did I as I pushed him to the side. I was inches away from beating him or even smothering him with a pillow, but I somehow opted to pull the comforter over him instead.

"Don't forget the bananas," Naruto said sternly in his sleep, finger waving dramatically in the air. With a weary sigh, I grabbed his arm and shoved it under the covers, securing it in place with a blanket. As I stepped back and regarded his dozing visage, I wondered how we would settle the matters of the previous night. Naruto always remembered what he did, and regardless of the fact that I tried to avoid him for at least a twenty-four hour period, he always found me and sat me down to have a talk about his alcohol-induced actions. It was closure. It made it so that we could face one another without hesitation, without that lingering recollection of _I remember what happened last night_. I was curious as to how he would play it off this time. He was rather good at linking his actions to some unresolved relationship and then laughing it off. I was probably making something out of a whole bunch of nothing. And yet, his lips seemed to whisper numerous words across my skin, and I grimaced and threw a pillow over his head. Five seconds later, I had pulled it off. If anyone could spontaneously die by accidental smothering, it was Naruto.

Walking into the bathroom, I quickly washed my face and tugged my shirt off, pausing in mute shock as my eyes fell upon the reddish-purple bruise neatly reflected in the mirror. I dropped my shirt in my surprise, the fingers of my right hand coming up to glide over the contusion above my collarbone.

I had a hickey. Naruto had given me a hickey. There was something exceedingly wrong about my straight roommate sucking on my neck hard enough to break blood vessels.

As if on key, Naruto trudged into the bathroom behind me, leaving yawns and stretches in his wake. "Morning," he greeted tiredly, covering his mouth with one hand and waving to me in the mirror with the other. Going still, his hand hung awkwardly in front of his lips as his eyes settled upon the quarter-shaped bruise on my neck. "Ne—Gaara," he said in puzzlement, slinging an arm over my shoulder, "did you go out last night after all?"

I couldn't look at him. We had never talked to one another so soon after such an incident. I settled my eyes on the sink. "No, I didn't."

"Then…" He peered over my shoulder, standing on his tippy toes and holding my upper arms as he tried to examine me closer. "…Who gave you this hickey?"

I slipped out of his grasp, saying "Very funny, Naruto," before heading back to the bedroom and pulling a black turtleneck out of a chest of drawers. Whereas I had expected things to be awkward, it was starting to feel like any other morning. And Naruto playing innocent did not do too well to improve my mood. "I assume we'll talk about this later," I said, pulling the fabric over my head and worming into the material. My dark-washed jeans from the former day would simply have to do.

"You look nice," Naruto said, admiring me from the bathroom doorway that he had propped his arm against. With his hair disheveled from sleep and his lazy blue eyes, I was fighting the urge to think he looked nice, too. "Any special occasion?"

"Just class, Naruto," I said tiredly, pulling on a black Converse shoe and proceeding to tie the laces. "Aren't you at all repentant?" I looked at him for a brief moment before searching around for my other piece of footwear.

Naruto seemed to pull my other shoe from nowhere, manifesting it like a cheap magic trick as he extended it toward me. "Repentant? For what?"

I propped my hands on my hips and examined him for another five seconds. Hastily, I grabbed my shoe and struggled to maintain my balance as I attempted to put it on while standing. Naruto reached a hand out and steadied me, and I was finally able to get the blasted thing on. "Are you playing stupid, or are you actually that dumb?" I inquired flatly. Glancing around for my backpack, Naruto picked it up and handed it to me as well.

"What did I do?" he asked innocently, making me feel like the one at fault. I was sure to maintain my blank stare.

"The hickey, Naruto," I finally disclosed. "It was another drunken night, so I don't blame you." Naturally, we seemed to migrate into the kitchen and front room. "I just thought you should be aware of what you're capable of when you're not sober." I had barely started searching for my paper when Naruto placed it perfectly in my hands. I looked from the glaring white to his face, which was alive with bafflement.

"Are you saying _I_ gave you that hickey?" he queried at last, even poking me in the vicinity of where he seemed to estimate said hickey to be.

I quickly stepped back and found my hand closing over the same area. "It's fine; these things happen." Actually, they usually _didn't_, but that was beside the point. "I suppose we'll have the usual talk later on today." Dropping my paper into my bag, I vainly tried to comb my hair with my fingers until Naruto pulled my hands away and mussed it up with his palm. I was skeptical. "How do I look?"

Naruto smiled charmingly, hands falling upon my shoulders again as I fought the internal urge to push him away. Why _now_ did I feel uncomfortable? "You look stunning," he teased, "as usual." Turning me around and walking me to the door, he opened it and placed the apartment keys in my hand. "Have a good day, Gaara."

I juggled the keys between my hands and turned to look at him with a critical gaze. "Yeah."

Nodding, his face adopted the sad expression in which his eyes seemed to hide something. "We'll talk later, okay?"

I could feel my heart skip a beat, but I wasn't sure why. Could it be that I was nervous? But I never got nervous. "Okay," I said quietly, shifting my bag on my arm. He continued to look at me with that knowing gaze before I could take no more of it and headed off down the hall. Naruto's amused laughter spilled out into the hallway, causing me to glare, but try as I might, I could not bring myself to be mad at him.

I tried not to think about what that meant.

**/**

**A/N**: This story will not be longer than a few chapters. It's meant to be a one-shot, but I've split it up since it's quite long (and it should be finished soon). It's also a more mature story (and I don't mean in the sexual sense, though that can apply as well), but I don't quite know how to explain it. I just hope you'll come to understand. I hope you enjoyed it, and if you didn't, sorry about that. Regardless, thanks for reading.


	2. Part 2 of 3

"And:Reboot" - _Part II_

Classes progressed strangely and far too fast. Whereas I usually found myself practically hanging onto every word of my professors—interesting or not—today I found that I could not stay focused for more than a few seconds. I kept thinking about that moment, kept hearing my name on his lips, kept feeling his lips on me, and if that wasn't frustrating, then I didn't know what was. And if that wasn't enough, everyone kept asking me if I was okay. Apparently my cheeks were particularly flushed. I could only glare and tell them that I was fine. _Leave me alone_ was, as usual, implied.

The one Friday I thought classes would never end, they seemed to end too fast, and soon I was walking to the coffee shop, which I refused to accept was a way of avoiding Naruto. I don't know why, but I didn't want to face him. I wouldn't really know what to say. It wasn't like this hadn't happened before; it had—many times—it was just that he had never said my name before, so I was at a bit of a loss as to what the proper reaction should have been. Was there even a proper reaction in such occasions?

It was close to eight when Naruto called me. I could tell he was a little worried by the sound of his voice, so I was sure to casually mention that I was fine. He laughed and said he knew I was avoiding him. I glared and said he didn't know me very well. It was a childish thing to say, but I said it nonetheless. It was also a complete lie, because he always had a niche for guessing exactly what I was doing. While I told myself this bugged me, I knew deep down that it was pretty cool, if not impressive.

"When you're done avoiding me," he said sarcastically, so that I could almost picture his face as he was saying it, "can you meet me at the apartment?"

"I have things to do…" I lied, looking out the window at the sliver of sun just barely visible in the far-off distance. I was on my fourth cup of coffee.

"It's—" I heard him sigh, then waited as a few seconds of silence passed between us. "It's important, Gaara," Naruto continued. I couldn't quite pick up what I was hearing in his voice. Frustration? Anger? Sadness? "You know we have to talk. Please…just meet with me, okay? Please?"

Naruto was the only person I knew who I would ever drop everything for just to do something he asked of me. He didn't know this, and he probably never would. I'd certainly never tell him. "Fine," I said tiredly, sighing as well. "I'll be over as soon as I can."

"Thanks," Naruto replied, so that I could hear the appreciation and small smile in his voice. He was also the only person I had ever been able to vividly picture no matter where I was. "I'll see you soon."

I could only answer a brief "Yeah" before closing my phone and finally heading home. He was sitting in the front room when I came in, and he must have been so engrossed in his thoughts that he didn't even hear me enter at first, turning only when I flipped on the light. He had been sitting in the dark, which could have been an unusual occurrence if I was not so used to it already. Sometimes, he just sat in the dark, in silence. I decided somewhere in our relationship that I wasn't going to ask him about it. If he wanted to sit in the dark, that was his own business. It had nothing to do with me.

"You're here," he said dazedly, blinking as his eyes adjusted. He stood and stretched, toned body straining slightly against the tight fabric of his shirt, and I coughed and looked away. Sometimes I thought he wore tight shirts just to aggravate me. Because it did aggravate me. Later on, I found out that he liked to run in his spare time, and the tight, black, long-sleeved shirts were just part of the routine. Knowing this didn't make me feel any less aggravated whenever he walked around with one on, however. Thankfully he grabbed an oversized t-shirt and threw it on, exercising his odd ability to make anything look good. I was not thankful for that.

"You asked me to come over," I grumbled, sounding angrier than I meant to, sounding, also, like I didn't even live with him. "Of course I'm here."

"Of course, of course," Naruto said merrily, shaking his head at me in the usual way, like I was a child prone to childish antics. I hated his headshakes. As if he knew this, he did them often. "You sound mad," he added with an elevated brow.

"I'm not," I all but snapped out, immediately feeling stupid. I wasn't looking at him, but I heard Naruto start laughing and glared. I was in love with his laugh, though. His _real_ laugh. If it was possible to love such a thing, then I knew that I loved his laughter. Naruto was one of those people that laughed with their very soul, revealing everything and nothing in the sound. It was one of those rare things in life that I found beautiful. He'd never know this, either.

"What did you want to talk about?" I finally asked, dropping my bookbag on a couch and bringing myself to face him. He might never have kissed my neck, the way we were able to face each other so blithely. Still, when he paused and faced me with an unreadable expression, I knew we were going to have The Talk. We could skirt around the topic all we wanted, but we always had to face the truth eventually. So Naruto had given me a hickey. So what? While it was a little embarrassing, just getting it out into the open would be enough to let me move on as usual.

"Right," he said slowly, motioning behind him to the couch he had previously occupied. "It's probably best if we sit down."

I stared at him in silence for a few moments, nearly asking if someone had died, but then knowing I would feel like an ass were that actually the case. Giving him one more skeptical glance, I walked over and took a seat right as he sat down in the space beside me. He didn't say anything for a while. _We_ didn't say anything. I was waiting for him to speak, and he was waiting for whatever it was that was weighing on his mind. This wasn't like him, I thought, as I watched him struggle with whatever he was going to say. He was usually so keen on jumping right in—it was always Naruto who brought it up so easily and me who sat in silence.

An image of the Naruto's bicycle flashed in my mind. I don't know why, but all I could think of was the stupid, yellow contraption and how well it matched his hair.

"Gaara," he said slowly, looking like he might put his hand on my leg before deciding against it. "What I'm about to tell you is…not easy. But…I think you should know—no, I _know _you should. I _want _you to know." Naruto didn't smile, and he didn't laugh, and suddenly I knew that this wasn't The Talk, but I found myself fervently wishing, for the first time, that it was.

"What are you talking about?" I managed to say, irritation outweighing my confusion.

Naruto only looked at me in silence for another moment. Then, very slowly, he said, "I have a condition. I'm going to forget everything. I'm going to forget you. And there's nothing you can do about it."

Then, prevailing silence.

I could only stare at him. I stared at him for a long time, face blank as my thoughts seemed to cease formation. I couldn't even move. I think I was waiting for him to jump up and start cracking up, saying something to the effect of "You should've seen your face," or "I totally got you this time," but he never said anything. He just stared right back at me, face calm as he waited patiently for my reply. All I could focus on was his breathing.

"That's cruel," I said eventually, probably five minutes after he had spoken. My voice was level, but it broke halfway through the sentence, ending in more of a whisper. "That's not funny, Naruto." Standing and collecting myself, it took more energy than I could remember to shake my head. "It's a shitty thing to do."

I left. I don't know how I reasoned that that was an acceptable response to the situation, but that's what I did. I just left. I walked all the way to the other edge of campus, spotted a bench sheltered mostly by trees, and sat down in it. I must've walked for twenty minutes, but all time seemed to stop as I sat there, contemplating his words. He was such an asshole. He played pranks like these on people all the time, and while I gained slight amusement from it, I never thought he would have the gall to pull it on me.

I was so angry. It was only when roughly three quarters of an hour had gone by that I realized how cold it was. It wasn't so much that it was cold, but there was a steady breeze that picked up so often, and it was just strong enough that, combined with nightfall, I was almost freezing. But I didn't care. I just ignored it. I could've gone into the nearby Law building, but another part of my mind seemed to say screw it all. Just screw it all. But most of all, screw Naruto for his stupid lies and stupid self and stupid, stupid, just, _stupid_…

"_Don't I know you?"_

I was suddenly thinking about how we first met. I had gotten to the room first and was pulling things out of boxes when someone stepped into the room. I stopped and turned, and there was Naruto, beaming from ear to ear like I was the love of his life just come back from a war. I wanted to hate him, but that stupid smile was almost infectious. Then he laughed, saying he was kidding and just wanted to start our friendship off in a familiar way, and I was just staring at him wondering why I had such horrible luck with these things. He was always a prankster, always playing jokes, always just being stupid.

"_Naruto, where's you car?"_

"_Oh…I crashed it."_

And suddenly I was thinking about that stupid bicycle again, and Naruto's look of regret when he told me he had crashed his car.

"_I was driving, and, all of a sudden…I forgot how to."_

"_You're such a liar."_

"_Seriously. Here's the damage report."_

He had smiled when he handed it to me, like it was some sort of game. He always thought everything was a game. It was no wonder I didn't believe him. But still, memories of the past few days were suddenly flashing in my mind, and I couldn't seem to stop them. I remembered Naruto asking for his car keys, and looking at me like I was lying when I told him his car was totaled. I saw him at the library, coming in late, saying he had forgotten. I saw his pensive blue eyes looking at nothing, staring into the darkness, turning toward me. I saw his smile, heard him laugh, _felt_ him.

"_You seem to be forgetting quite a bit lately."_

"_Have I?" _

Again, had he been waiting for me to ask him what was wrong?

"_I have a condition. I'm going to forget everything. I'm going to forget you. And there's nothing you can do about it."_

Beside me, the leaves of a tree rustled, and Naruto emerged into the darkness beside me. He was also the only person who could find me no matter where I was. He was breathing hard, so I could tell he had probably been searching for a while, but he didn't say anything. I didn't look at him, didn't even turn toward him as he shook his head and sat beside me. I wanted him to get mad and say he had been looking for me everywhere, but he only put his arm around my shoulders.

"Jesus, Gaara," he said, rubbing his hand on my arm and sitting closer to me. "You're freezing." It was only when I felt his warmth that I realized I was shivering, and slowly, the feeling crept back into my limbs and I felt the far-off strain of sitting in one place for too long. Opening my mouth, I was ready to ready to get mad at him and tell him how much of an ass he was, but I ended up crying instead. The tears came before I could stop them, before I even knew they were rolling down my cheeks, and I clutched at my hair and bent over, shaking from both the cold and trembling sobs that threatened to wrack my body. Naruto only pulled me closer, wrapping his hands around me and laying his head on me and holding me through it all.

I didn't even cry when my father killed himself and I happened to be the one who found him. I was sad, torn apart inside, but I couldn't cry. The feelings just stopped. It was like there were too many, all threatening to come out at once, and so they all conglomerated into a clog, making it so that none could be released. Yet, I cried over Naruto. I actually cried over the stupid blond who I didn't even like in the first place, who pushed his way into my life with his stupid smile and stupid life, and thought it was all right to miss class on a whim, and ate breakfast for dinner, and occasionally tried to kiss me, and somehow managed to fill a space in my life that no one else could and likewise never would again.

Funny how that happens.

/

Naruto slept with me that night. Not in the sexual way, but in the way that allowed him to hold me in his arms and tell jokes for roughly an hour while my inexplicable sorrow gradually morphed into all-out annoyance.

I told him to shut up and sleep in his own bed at least five times, but I knew he wouldn't budge. He had slept in bed with me one other time when a guy I had really liked had capriciously dumped me, and I had told him then that I was fine then, but he just laughed and slipped into bed with me, holding me so I couldn't push him out. It was the second time in two days that we had slept together, but at least this time he wasn't inebriated. I finally ignored him, but not long after I stopped talking to him completely, I heard his breathing deepen and even out, and I didn't have to look to know that he was asleep. But I looked at him anyway.

I supposed he was handsome; I had never really looked at him like that. He had always just been Naruto, that boy who was my friend even if he was always getting on my nerves. But that was just it. I think I always thought Naruto would be there; I had never considered the fact that things could change. Maybe I took him for granted. Maybe I was just being stupid.

Turning away from him, I closed my eyes and pretended he wasn't there. The steady heat of his body told me otherwise.

I don't know when I fell asleep, but I woke up freezing, irritated that it probably had to do with the fact that Naruto was no longer beside me. I felt exhausted, but at the same time, I felt…better. It was weird, but I definitely felt just a little bit better. It was close to 10:30 when I finally rolled out of bed and put on acceptable Saturday morning clothes. Naruto was in the kitchen making Saturday breakfast as usual—he said that it made him feel like a productive member of our two-some. I didn't want to argue, and I was usually too tired by Saturday morning to care. His cooking was horrible, though. Well, not horrible, but I'd certainly had better. As long as it was edible, I didn't care, and I didn't say anything to him about it—not because I didn't want to hurt his feelings, but because I'm sure he already knew. We always ate breakfast together on Saturdays, and oftentimes he would take a bite of food, looking in surprise from his plate to my face, all the while smiling like some incognizant fool. Like I said, he's stupid, but that didn't stop me from stopping in the hall and just watching him in silence as he toiled blissfully over the stove…Just watching him.

Stupidity must be infectious.

Clearing my throat to alert him of my presence, I walked into the kitchen and plopped down in a chair.

"Almost ready," he called over his shoulder, dancing around in his white t-shirt and boxers. He was always shameless about such matters, running around with no shirt, no pants, and sometimes no underwear. Once it had been somewhat funny when Naruto had performed a little dance in just his boxers to try and cheer me up, and something accidentally poked through. He was morbidly embarrassed, and it did greatly improve my mood, but I never told him. I think I provided the usual insult as he mumbled on in the corner about how it was the end of the world.

I felt myself falling back into melancholy, and so I got up and went to the bathroom to wash my face. Pulling down the collar of my shirt, I looked again at the bruise on my collarbone before readjusting my top and turning off the light. Naruto was setting out the plates when I came back, and he knew me well enough to know how many spoonfuls of sugar my cups of coffee took, and that I took no cream. I sipped at it as he filled our plates with something that probably should have been French toast.

"Here ya go," he said cheerfully, as he placed one final dollop on my plate. I eyed it suspiciously before waiting for him to sit down and take a bite. It tasted as disturbing as it looked, but my face didn't reveal anything as we proceeded to eat in the normal silence.

"So," I said when I had basically finished, pushing my plate forward and resting my hands in my lap. Naruto pushed his plate forward as well, as if he had to do the same thing, and I was sure he probably thought it was some form of respect, but I really couldn't have cared less. "You're just…going to forget everything." My questions were usually posed as statements, because I didn't like asking questions. I simply hoped answers were provided to whatever I happened to comment upon. Naruto was able to catch onto this rather quickly in our relationship, probably surprising us both.

"Exactly." Naruto looked a little gloomy having the subject brought up again, but he also looked like he knew it was something that was eventually going to have to be discussed.

I just stared at him, finding it hard to do much else. "And this is just some kind of condition you have."

"Exactly," Naruto said again. "It's called Latent Oscillatory Alzheimer's—L.O.A. for short. Oh," he added as an afterthought, "and it's an 'early onset' in my case, according to the doctors, that is."

"Latent Oscillatory Alzheimer's," I repeated, looking at my hands in my lap and then back to his face. "I thought only old people were diagnosed with Alzheimer's."

Naruto elevated a brow, raising a finger in the air as if to point to the ceiling. "That's what I thought, but if you break it apart, it explains it all. This is still all according to the doctors, but it's obviously a memory disease—that's the Alzheimer's part. It's 'latent' because it rests in the body's system, undetectable until it decides to activate, and this can be at any time, but it's usually when one is much older. The 'oscillatory' part simply means that I'm going to forget everything, and then sort of remember it all again." I thought he was finished, until he smiled and added, "Oh, and the 'early onset' means it's happening to me now, rather than when I'm an old man." He was smiling like he had just decoded some complex problem.

I'm sure I looked as if I was viewing Niagara Falls for the twentieth time and either didn't know what to think or was clearly not impressed. "You're going to forget everything…and then remember it all…" I felt my hands drawing into tight fists, which I was thankful he couldn't see. "Everything?"

Naruto looked at me, shaking his head in agreement. "Yeah, pretty much. They say it's like unlearning everything you've learned, and then having to relearn it. The worst part is that I won't remember my old memories." He turned away from me, seemingly staring into space, but I knew he was thinking about what it would be like to lose everything he had gained up until that point. I couldn't even imagine what it would be like. "Anyway," he faced me with a grin, "it'll be like growing up again, so it won't be so bad. You just have to look at it from the bright side."

I couldn't see how there was a bright side to any of this. Naruto was going to forget everything—he was going to forget me, and he wouldn't even be able to remember me. It hardly seemed fair. "Latent Oscillatory Alzheimer's," I said again, not really knowing why, and not really able to control it either. My voice didn't seem like my own—hollow and empty, and I felt like I was in a world where horrible things happened to good people. I _was_ in that world.

But Naruto's laughter broke me out of my daze as he grabbed both our plates and cups and turned to the sink to watch them. "Yep. Apparently it's one of those one-in-a-million type things." Grabbing both our coffee cups, he seemed to avoid my eyes.

"Why aren't you taking this seriously?" I asked, feeling a bit of anger rising up within me.

"How should I take it?" Naruto asked me at the sink, dipping a sponge into a cup. "There's nothing I can do about it."

"Be mad. Be upset. Show some emotion other than this futile resignation." The anger was subsiding now, leaving a strange form of apathy in its wake.

"You can be mad and upset for me, okay?" Naruto turned toward me, drying his hands on a towel before setting it aside. "Me? I just want to be me for as long as I can."

I watched him leaning against the counter, until my eyes wandered back to my hands. "That's okay for you. You're going to forget. You don't have to remember."

"You can remember for me," Naruto said, voice warm so I could see his kind smile in my mind.

"Don't make me do this."

"I believe in you."

"Don't believe in me."

Naruto crossed the small distance between us, pulling my face against his stomach. I was glad I didn't have to face him in that moment, because I'm not sure what I would've done. His pulsating warmth spread into me again, and I took in a deep breath, inhaling Naruto's natural scent. Of course, he smelled good. When I realized how close my face was to his crotch, however, I pushed him away, saying something to the effect that I didn't need to be babied. Naruto only laughed.

/

Naruto asked me to spend the day with him. For some reason, I said yes.

We had never spent the entire day together; usually, we hung out for an afternoon, spent a few hours at the library, or relaxed a little at a weekend party, but we never spent a whole day with one another. Maybe that's why I was nervous. I mean, sure, I'd known him for over two years, but still…I'd never seen him for more than a limited time-period. It was strange.

It also felt suspiciously like a date. Naruto opened doors for me, pulled out chairs, refused to let me pay for anything, and finally, when we had stopped at a little café and he told me to put away my wallet yet again, I felt the need to say something.

"You don't have to do this." That wasn't really what I had meant to say, but I suppose it worked.

Naruto's smile spread across his face as if on cue. "You're right," he agreed with a nod, "but I want to. We don't spend too much time together like this, and we should."

I don't know why I said it, but I found my lips moving and the words coming out, saying, "You mean, before you forget everything?"

Naruto paused, face falling and making me feel like a complete ass. In record time, however, he had restored his spirits and was smiling again. "Regardless of my condition, we should spend more time together. Don't you think?"

I stared down at my espresso. At least it's swirling-brown depths didn't confuse my thoughts like the blue of Naruto's eyes. "I guess."

We were quiet for a few more minutes, before Naruto's laugh broke the silence. I looked up at him with a skeptical glance.

"Did I really give you that hickey?" he asked, still laughing a little as he said it.

I felt myself redden. "Of course you did," I said a little angrily. "I certainly wouldn't make such foolishness up."

"Of course, of course." Naruto was still releasing little chuckles. "That must've been quite an experience."

I was glad he was taking delight in the situation. And that was sarcasm, by the way. "It's not funny," I stated flatly, face still a little warm. I watched as he tried his best to stop smiling, placing his hands around his mouth and squeezing his lips into a frown.

"You're right. This is serious business."

Sometimes I thought that he really did think everything was a game, finding humor where there really was nothing to laugh at. Then again, some might see that as a rare gift.

"You're so weird," was all I could say.

"It's too bad I can't remember…" His voice held that sad note in it again, causing me to unwittingly look at him. I wondered how fast he would lose everything. I wondered how long it would take. I wondered why I was depressing myself with such thoughts.

Naruto took a few more sips of his iced coffee, before placing his empty cup down and facing me again. "The way I see it, there are two benefits to my circumstances: You can do anything you might regret and I'll forget about it, or, you can do everything you regret not doing the next time around." And he was smiling again. How on earth could he bring himself to think of benefits to his circumstances?

"You're really going to have to learn everything again?" I asked, sure my face's calm appearance was melting to reveal a more sober expression. "You won't get your old memories back?"

Naruto's smile faded a little, too. "There's no guarantee I won't remember everything." He patted me on the shoulder and his touch seemed to linger. "You just have to make a good enough impression."

I was just glad to have his hand leave my arm. "What would I even want to do that I would regret?" I asked, dubious glance back again.

"Only you could know that," answered Naruto, looking at me like I was stupid and making me feel insulted. "Oh," he suddenly looked excited, "We should make a list of things to do before I lose my memories! That'd be cool."

The look on my face must've been the typical "are you crazy" look, because Naruto was about to laugh again. "Like what?" I questioned, disbelief heavily tinting my words. "Climb a mountain?"

"Nothing like that," Naruto said with the usual headshake. "I mean, things we should together. Weird and daring things."

"Weird and daring," I repeated, slowly, fearing where the conversation had potential to go.

"Yeah," Naruto said casually. "For example, you're gay. Let's have a one-night stand. I've always wanted to know what it's like to sleep with a guy."

I don't know that my mouth has ever literally dropped in response to a comment, but I know when Naruto said that, it was only a few seconds later that I realized my mouth was open. I wanted to say something, anything, tell him he was an idiot, something, but no words would form. For some reason, I could also feel myself getting angry. Maybe it had something to do with the way he had implied that it would be weird and daring to sleep with me.

"Seriously," Naruto added after a while. "We should do it. We're close enough that it shouldn't be very weird between us, and I might forget about it the next day. Either way, I'd like to give it a try."

It was me that almost laughed, this time.

The rest of the day, we just walked in silence, taking in the natural beauty of the campus together. We walked closer together than I had ever remembered walking, so that our hands brushed together and our shoulders occasionally bumped, but Naruto didn't seem to notice. He just walked along, taking everything in, watching it all intently as if he was trying to brand the memory into eternity. I suppressed the urge to take ahold of his hand.

/

It only took a week or so to realize that Naruto had been serious about sleeping with me.

He brought it up as casual dinner conversation. He brought it up in the morning. He brought it up when I exited the shower only in a towel. He brought it up before bed. At first, I had thought he was joking, but as the questions increased, I realized that there was a good chance that he would've had sex with me had I actually said yes. This made me uncomfortable, to say the least.

We were friends. Friends did not sleep with one another—not like _that_, anyway. Sure, there were the occasional friends-with-benefits, but that was between people of the same sexuality. I was homosexual. Naruto was heterosexual. I liked boys. Naruto liked girls…at least, the last time I checked he did. He had admitted that he had had one gay experience as a child in which he had practiced French kissing with a friend, but that had been it. Besides, I was convinced that all people had at least one gay experience in their lives, and it was perfectly normal. Childhood is blissfully ignorant that way.

But we were not children. We were nearly adults—considered to have a good judgment of right and wrong. It wasn't that sleeping with Naruto seemed to wrong to me; I just couldn't seem to bring myself to reason it out as right. And I'd had casual sex before; that wasn't the problem. I just…I don't know. It just seemed awkward to have sex with Naruto. Sex was already an awkward situation. Sex with Naruto…It just seemed weird.

And the more he asked me, the angrier I became about it all. It was like he was treating it as another game. I don't know why, but I couldn't see it as easily as he was seeing it. For him, it might just be sexual intercourse with one other person that he would forget, but for me…I would remember that I had slept with Naruto for the rest of my life. Could I really handle such knowledge? Sex without feelings. I used to think that there was nothing wrong with it, but with Naruto…I don't know. I just didn't know.

We were driving back from a recognition dinner when he brought it up again. Feeling a bit tired, I had practically forced Naruto to drive, promising to keep an eye on him, and, to my surprise, he actually agreed. I saw the hesitance in his eyes, though. I wouldn't have been able to fall asleep even if I had wanted to.

I liked to watch him drive, though; it made me feel at peace, the way he braced his hands loosely on the wheel, and how he was able to take turns one-handedly and with a quaint grace. Every couple of miles, he would turn and smile at me. What the hell was wrong with us?

"Wanna do it tonight?" he asked nonchalantly, turning toward me again for a brief moment, before turning his eyes back toward the road.

I don't know why, but something seemed to snap inside of me then. Why was he so bent on asking me all the time? Why did he want to sleep with me so badly? I felt like a plaything that Naruto thought he could use and discard arbitrarily, and while I knew this couldn't have been farther from the truth, I felt my anger flare up anyway. I had been slumped against the door, but I suddenly reached over and unzipped his fly, like I had been reaching for the salt or something else inconsequential. If Naruto was going to treat this in such a laissez-faire way, then so was I. I was tired of troubling myself over it anyway. I probably would have slipped my hand into his pants, too, if he hadn't flipped out on me and veered off the road. And he did veer off the road—completely—tires flying over the asphalt grooves and emitting a horrendous sound as my car swerved head-first into a small bank, coming to an abrupt stop.

I don't know how the airbags didn't deploy, because we had hit the ditch pretty hard, and there was no way my car was coming away from this incident undamaged. No one came over the bank to see if we were all right, and I would've thought this was a little weird had I not considered that it was nearing dark and the route we had taken was a less-travelled back-road of a more rural area. We were both breathing really hard. Thankfully, our safety belts had activated, and so we hung rather forward rather awkwardly, eyes boring into the dash.

I heard Naruto start laughing. "Oh my god," he said a little hysterically. "Oh my god." When his laughter had settled, he pulled himself back in his chair and slowly turned to look at me. He looked concerned and a little scared. "Are you okay?"

"…Yeah."

With a tired sigh, Naruto put the car into reverse, somehow managing to back it up and onto the side of the road. It was nearly dark now, the reds, oranges, and purples of dusk blending wonderfully in the dimming sky. I could already see that a headlight was busted, but I didn't care. I was just glad we were alive.

My silence must've worried Naruto, because he put his hand on my leg and asked me again if I was sure I was okay. I looked at his hand, felt the warmth that seemed to cascade around it, and suddenly I was remembering his lips again. I imagined them in place of his hand, with no material to separate the two, and then I looked at Naruto. He wasn't looking at me.

"It must've been scary," I said quietly. "To forget how to drive."

Naruto swallowed hard, not bothering to attempt a smile. "It was."

We sat in silence for a few minutes more before he seemed to notice that his pants were still unzipped, and then he noticed me, my eyes on him, his hand on me—but he didn't remove it. He kept it there, deep blue never once leaving the blue-green of my eyes. And then he moved his hand, just a fraction, up my leg. I don't know if he meant to or not, but my breath hitched anyway. And then his hand moved again, and I knew it was on purpose this time, because his fingers traced my own zipper before he unfastened his seatbelt and leaned towards me.

I wanted to fight him. I really wanted to fight him. But I didn't. I couldn't. I _wanted_ him to touch me.

He leaned over me, face disappearing somewhere towards the side of my own face, and I felt his fingers fumbling with my pants. He didn't kiss me, and probably the weirdest thing about our encounter that night was that he didn't kiss me. I just felt his hands as they finally undid the front of my jeans, and my own hands as they reached up and tangled into his shirt, pulling him even closer to me. For some reason, but I needed him close. My breath came in short, trembling gasps, and I could feel his hand shaking as it slowly slid into my pants. I don't know why, but I almost felt like I was going to cry again, and I felt a soft whisper against my ear, saying something again and again before I realized it was Naruto, saying "It's okay; it's okay; it's okay…"again and again, but it wasn't okay. It just didn't seem like anything was okay anymore.

I think a part of me was relieved when I saw the flashing lights pull up. Naruto must've seen the police cruiser before it turned on its lights, because he sighed and returned to his seat, leaving me to wonder what in the world was going on. The officer, an older man in his thirties, came up to the window by the time Naruto had already prepared his flawless grin.

"Good afternoon, officer," he said cheerfully, seeming more suspicious than guiltless.

The policeman had his flashlight out, pointing it at both of our faces. He wasted no time in getting to the chase. "I received a call about a car of this description driving into a ditch." He glanced toward the broken headlight. "Was that you two boys?"

"Yeah," Naruto scratched the back of his head. "There was a deer in the road, so we swerved to miss it. You know how it is."

The officer walked around to the front of the car, pointing his flashlight all over it before coming back to Naruto's passenger window. "Well, you've got a broken headlight, so I'll give you a warning. You're lucky you two boys are all right."

"We are," answered Naruto truthfully, so I could tell that he really meant it. I just sat silently in my chair, hoping to disappear from the earth, wishing fervently that such a thing were possible. The policeman flashed his lights on both our faces again, before the light landed on Naruto's unzipped fly, and then naturally seemed to gravitate to my unbuttoned pants. I didn't care anymore, eyes staring forward at the small slice of daylight left in the horizon, and I don't know if the officer saw something in my face that seemed to suggest that there was no way what he was no doubt considering could have happened, but either way, he patted the top of the car and told us to have a good night. A few seconds later, the flashing lights died down, and I watched the twin red of his taillights disappear into the distance.

Naruto didn't say anything after that. Perhaps he thought I was asleep, what with the way my head was leaning against the passenger window. It was dark out, too, and a heavy silence, the kind that deafens, seemed to pervade the small car as Naruto started it up and we were on our way again. I wanted him to say something. But, at the same time, I'm glad he didn't say anything. I wondered if I would ever learn to make up my mind.

I also wondered what in the hell had just happened.

**/ **

**A/N: **Gah, the angst...Also, be aware that the final part of this story is both explicit and around 13000 words, so plan accordingly. An editted version is finally available (link in next chapter). Thanks for reading :D


	3. Part 3 of 3

((**Note**: There is now an editted version of this chapter at my livejournal, only I could not fit the entire chapter within one post. So, there will be an asterisk (*) that marks the explicit scene. The editted (less explicit) version of that point onward can be found here: **evergreengarden(dot)livejournal(dot)com/8602(dot)html#cutid1** - Again, that link is not the entire chapter, only the editted version of the rest of this chapter from the asterisk onwards. And you'll have to replace the (dot)s with real dots if you copy and paste that link. is kind of funny about links. We now return to your regular programming.))

* * *

"And:Reboot" - _Part III_

It had been about a month since the incident in the car. Neither of us brought it up, and I figured that that was fine with me. It was not everyday you almost jerked off your roommate. I couldn't help but feel a little bit bitter about it, however.

It was the first awkward moment that we didn't sit down and explicitly discuss. There was no closure. As a result, I had trouble facing him or even being in the same room with him alone for too long. It made me uncomfortable. It was strange that things had to become awkward between us now, but I figured it was for the best. I would need to start distancing myself from him anyway, if I was ever to have any hope of getting over his memory loss. Soon, Naruto wouldn't be Naruto anymore, so I just kept telling myself that it was for the best.

And Naruto, well, he very well may have forgotten about it. I think that's what I wanted to believe, but sometimes I saw that familiar spark in his eyes, felt that lingering warmth from his hand whenever he patted me on the shoulder. The worst part was that I didn't want to see it. I just wanted things to go back to normal; I wanted things to go back to how they used to be. Somehow, I knew that was impossible.

I suppose what bugged me the most about the occurrence in the car was that I wasn't sure what had brought it about. Had Naruto planned to sleep with me then and there, or was it something else? I mean, he had asked me about having sex that night, but when he put his hand on my leg and suddenly ended up on top of me, it just seemed…different. His hands had been shaking. He seemed as scared and uncertain as I couldn't deny that I was in that moment. He didn't seem like he was touching me just to touch me, but because he really wanted to touch me.

Needless to say, I kept having a lot of weird dreams about it, and kept waking up to a lot of cold showers. It was not fun. Thankfully, Naruto never asked about sleeping with me again, so I was able to brush the absurd notions that that might be a possibility away. I was stupid to believe what he said, anyway.

During our small period of what we refused to believe was estrangement, I was able to learn a little bit more about Naruto's condition from Sakura, one of Naruto's former conquests who just happened to be a Pre-Med major. It wasn't that I cared, I had just run into her at the café and she had suggested we sit and chat for a while. This meant that she did all the talking, because I certainly didn't "chat". Regardless, she told me that L.O.A. usually took about two years to fully wipe someone's memories clean, and another three of intense rehabilitation in order to build that person back to the same level of mental state that they were at previously. In other words, I would be twenty-five before Naruto was himself again. I felt sick. Sakura seemed to notice my small shift in disposition, and she tried to cheer me up by telling me that different people reacted to the condition differently, so he might recover faster. That just meant that Naruto might forget me faster.

"You just need to be sure to spend a lot of time with him," Sakura told me, a reassuring smile on her face that I couldn't bring myself to hate. "Don't waste the time that you have now."

That was probably the most intelligent thing that I had ever heard her say, which didn't really do her justice, seeing as I had never really spent a lot of time alone with her. She also told me I was lucky to have known about it for so long, because Naruto hadn't told anyone else until the past week. I didn't feel lucky. I just felt sad.

"If you're in some kind of fight with him, forgive him," Sakura gently instructed. I wondered if Naruto had told her we weren't really talking. I doubted he had told her about the car incident, but if he had, I would kill him. "L.O.A. doesn't discriminate between long- and short-term memories. He could lose anything. Just make sure you don't do something you'll regret."

I had to wonder if it was already too late for that.

/

Naruto started having nightmares again. I was surprised, because they were also an occurrence that had been more prominent during our freshman year, thinning out during our sophomore year, and nearly disappearing for most of our junior year. Either way, he'd woken me up more than a few times, yelling and thrashing about like he was about to be murdered.

The first time it had happened, Naruto had not warned me beforehand, and I was jarred out of sleep by him screaming bloody murder. It was one of the most peculiar things I had ever witnessed. I turned on the light and shook him and called out his name, but nothing worked. He just wouldn't wake up. And he really thrashed about, too. I was worried he might hurt himself, maybe even me, so all I could do was grab hold of him and squeeze him as tightly as possible until he calmed down—essentially until he wore himself out. He was a high-maintenance friend. But I still did it, and I didn't mind doing it, because Naruto really was my friend, irritating or not.

He had told me that he had been having them since he was a child, and no one was ever able to find out why; it was just the way he was. He said he didn't even remember what he dreamed about during these episodes, but he just knew that it was something terrifying. I hated these moments because I couldn't do anything for him, and when I told him this, being sure to rephrase it to something like, "There's no helping you when you're like that," he would always smile and say, "Just being with me is enough." And, slowly but surely, he stopped having the bad dreams.

That's why I was really confused and really caught off guard when he woke me up one Thursday night screaming. It wasn't really screaming, but it was more of a high-pitched yell—a desperate cry for help of sorts. At any rate, it scared me a little, and I rushed over to his bed to see if he was all right, not even bothering with the overhead light. He flailed his limbs wildly, and before I could grab his arms, he slugged me pretty good in the eye. I ignored the searing pain that seemed to engulf one entire half of my face and crawled onto the bed, pulling him right into my arms. He was strong; I'd give him that, and I nearly gave up a few times during his paroxysm, but I pushed aside thoughts of quitting and held him even tighter.

It was a lot worse that night than it had ever been, and Naruto kicked and screamed and went on for a good fifteen minutes, and when I thought I could hold him at bay no longer, I pulled him close to my face and found myself whispering, "it's okay; it's okay; it's okay…" again and again, and finally he gave up struggling and was still, face dropping onto my lap as his body sagged onto the bed. A tremendous relief spread throughout my exhausted body, and sometime after that, I fell asleep. The wall by Naruto's bed had never felt so comfortable.

I woke up first the next morning, a terrible crick in my neck alerting me that it was time to move. My first surprise of the morning came when I become conscious of the fact that one of Naruto's hands was almost all the way down the back of my boxers, probably seeking warmth. Removing his hand, I covered his up as was the usual norm, and cracked and strained all the way to the bathroom.

My second surprise came when I looked in the mirror and saw the ring of black that surrounded my right eye. Poking it sent a wave of blinding pain throughout my face, and as I whispered a string of curses, I realized that I hadn't left my makeup on one eye as I was accustomed to do. Naruto had gotten me pretty damn good.

I had just finished washing my face and was drying it when said blond walked in. Actually, he rushed in, face full of worry and alerting me that he must've realized what had happened. Sometimes he just knew.

"Oh my god," he said in the doorway, freezing there as if he was afraid to cross the distance between us when he had finally caught sight of my eye. I just looked at him, not at all surprised that those were the first three _real_ words that I had heard him speak to me in five and some odd weeks. "Gaara—"

"I'm okay," I cut him off monotonously, avoiding his eyes by way of mirror in which I lightly touched the swollen skin around my own eye. It really hurt, and I think Naruto noticed this, despite my efforts to hide my wince, because he stepped into the bathroom and placed his hands on my shoulders, gently but firmly pulling me toward him.

"Did I—Was it—" he began, seeming unable to ask what he already knew. "I did that?"

I stared at him for a while, thinking first that it was weird to feel his hands on my bare upper arms. I wished I hadn't taken off my shirt. "You had a nightmare," I said, as if it explained it all, and in a way, it did. I was going to say something else, some unnecessary comment about how it was nothing new, but Naruto spread his hands on both sides of my face and pulled me close, destroying any other thoughts, as he brought his lips over my black eye.

I had expected it to hurt, but his cool touch was comforting as he rested his mouth against my closed eye. I felt his lips move as if he might say something, but he let his arms fall away and left the room without another word. It took me another minute to realize that my hand was gliding over where his lips had been. It took me another minute to realize just how fast my heart was beating.

It was that following Saturday morning during the sixth week of our estrangement that Naruto starting talking to me like nothing had ever happened. I was just glad that he was talking to me again, but my normal, blank stare kept this fact perfectly hidden.

"Morning, sunshine," he chirped, far too happy to be up at nine in the morning. Sitting at the table, he placed a cup of coffee in front of me, followed by a bowl of oatmeal. I kept quiet when he put four spoonfuls of sugar in my glass, accompanied by a drop of cream. In his own cup, he put a mere two spoonfuls of sugar, and that was all, but the small smile of his face told me that he didn't realize he had switched our orders. I had never felt so automatically miserable. Taking one sip of his drink seemed to pull him back to reality, and he laughed and exchanged our mugs. "Sorry about that. I must not be awake yet."

I knew better. "It's fine," I replied disinterestedly, taking a sip of the bitter liquid. Making coffee never was one of his strong suits, but I had always liked how he knew this and made it for me anyway. He was a smartass like that sometimes.

A part of me wondered if he really had forgotten about the car incident, but what he said next reaffirmed the fact that he could still read my thoughts. "I'm sorry," he said, voice quieter than usual. He didn't face me when he spoke, eyes glued to the glass, and I couldn't figure out whether I was upset or insulted by that. "I'm sorry about what happened. It was…I don't know," he trailed off. For once, I found myself wishing I could guess what he was thinking. "I don't know what happened. I guess I was just confused or something."

Or stupid, I resisted the urge to say. Or maybe we were both so very stupid. "It's fine," I replied again, staring at my coffee like it held all the answers. "It happens." Once again, it usually _didn't_ happen, but whatever. Everything was starting to feel like whatever. But at least things were starting to feel normal between us again. I think some messed up part of me missed the idiot blond beside me. That messed up part would probably always miss him.

"And sorry about your eye," he added after a bit. I could tell he was being sincere. "Does it hurt very bad?"

"It's fine," I said once more. For some reason, I found myself thinking that it was March, and there were only two more months before I would be home for the summer, two more months and I would be a senior. Two more months and I wouldn't see Naruto for at least three more. Why did that dishearten me more than usual?

"Truce?" Naruto asked suddenly, bright smile and extended hand pulling me out of my gloomy reverie. He was the only person who could do it so effortlessly, and would probably never know. Looking at his outstretched palm, I couldn't help but remember that it was the same hand he had slipped down the front of my pants. Goddamn him.

"_Don't waste the time that you have now."_

I wondered why I was remembering Sakura's words at that moment. But she was right. I made it so that I looked unaffected as usual as I shook his hand and gave him the normal, skeptical glance. It was probably my imagination, but he seemed to hold my hand longer than usual. I was sure it was my imagination.

"And about the coffee," he eventually continued, letting go of my hand and putting his own hands in pockets as if it was the only place they could be trusted. "I—" looking at me for another span of time, he sighed and smiled for real. "Eventually I'll forget that I'm forgetting, though that won't be for a while yet. Just be patient with me, okay?"

I didn't know that it was rhetorical until he grabbed our plates and mugs and turned to the sink, which was funny, because I kind of wanted to answer him.

"Oh yeah," Naruto said after a bit, craning his head toward me briefly. "Are you doing anything tonight?"

I wanted to make up something, but I couldn't think of a lie fast enough. I suppose I just didn't want to admit how badly I wanted to see him. "No, why?"

"Wanna go with me to a party tonight?"

I hated that such a harmless question still made so internally happy. In another life, I probably would have smiled. In this life, I could only reply unenthusiastically as usual. "Sure."

Things seemed to finally be back to normal. I wanted to believe that I couldn't ask for more than that.

/

I was just glad that the party wasn't themed. As I searched for something to wear to the party we were due to in an hour, I remembered a time during our sophomore year when Naruto had dragged me along to a schoolboy/schoolgirl-themed party. It was my first time experiencing such a thing, but it was enough for me to ascertain that I would avoid such events at all costs in the future. People already acted weird and out of character at such outings—quiet and academic honor students turning into wild party-animals—and themed parties only seemed to pull them into even more abnormal personas. The only entertainment I had gained from the experience was that this cute guy from my European Survey course kissed me in a drunken stupor. I didn't really mind—he was a really good kisser, but nothing compared to the face of complete embarrassment he showed me when he walked into class that following Monday. He was straight, by the way. I think Naruto had known this at the moment, too, but he just smiled and gave me a thumbs-up. The next thing I knew, the guy's tongue was in my mouth. If memory serves me right, Naruto's smile seemed a little forced. I thought it was because he'd never seen two guys kiss before. I don't know why it didn't occur to me then that his first kiss had been with one.

I also don't know why I remembered that now.

Naruto was pulling his pants on and hopping around quite animatedly so that I could do nothing but watch him. I didn't know what I was going to wear anyway, and in truth, I didn't really care. Naruto's crazy-pants dance went on until he nearly knocked over his chair, and when I could take no more of the odd spectacle, I walked over to him, seeing him freeze and glance at me, and wordlessly yanked his pants up.

"Honestly," I muttered, discreetly releasing a breath and fastening the button on his jeans. I tried not to stare too long at the near-invisible blond hairs that started below his navel and disappeared into the waistband of his boxers.

"Thanks," Naruto said, voice drowning out a bit as he bent over to look at his pants as if they were some kind of ancient relic. I just raised a hairless brow and sat down backwards in my desk chair. Crossing my upper limbs over it, I leaned my chin on my arms and let out another sigh. Naruto came over to me, ruffling my hair and resting his hand on my head for a few seconds before pulling it away. "Are you feeling okay? You don't have to come if you don't want to." He smiled. "I won't force you."

I looked up at him for a moment, then cast my eyes downward. "Will there be any cute guys there?" I think that was the first sarcastic comment I had ever made to him. Naruto's resulting laugh nearly pulled a smile from me.

"Of course," he replied enchantingly. "I do plan on going."

I couldn't help but feel that I was extremely lucky to be paired with a roommate such as Naruto. He was tolerant of my sexuality, and he respected me as a person. Then I recalled that that might all change. Certainly the smiling boy before me would gradually be erased.

"You should hurry up and get dressed," he said, playfully chucking me under the chin. "Ino could be here anytime. She lives by her own schedule."

"Ino?" Something in my voice seemed to make Naruto grin. It wasn't that I didn't like her, but I wasn't exactly fond of the girl either. Maybe it was because she was forward. And touchy. And loud. Regardless, my feelings were mixed, because she could do magic with a pen, paper, and a model like it was nobody's business.

"She's our driver," Naruto turned away, pulling on a white undershirt. "Be nice," he warned playfully, pulling a preppy button-up at random from the closet and putting it on. He really could make anything look good. Goddamn him. _He_ looked good. I don't know if it was that particular outfit, or if it was simply that I was finally letting myself acknowledge it. Probably both. Running a comb through his hair, then shaking it out for a more natural look, he pulled on his sneakers and was ready.

I still had my clothes on from earlier. They were anything but suitable. "Get dressed," Naruto said teasingly, shaking me by the shoulders until I got to my feet. I waved him away and spent another five minutes in front of the closet, before he walked over and draped a pair of jeans over my shoulder, along with one of his striped polos. I didn't really like polos, but I was too apathetic about my outfit to argue with him about it. At least it was black and white.

Naruto's judgment turned out to be surprisingly effective, because the jeans made my legs look skinnier than they were, and the shirt messed with the eyes so I looked a bit taller than I was when viewed together with the pants. I almost looked like a normal member of society. Were it not for the large ring around my eye. Walking to the bathroom, I pulled out my black pallet and prepared to cover the bruise with it, but the moment the eyeliner stick hit my eyelid, I dropped it and somehow managed not to scream. My eye would not be receiving cosmetic attention anytime soon. Naruto walked in around that moment, taking a record three seconds to figure out what was going on, before he grabbed me by the wrist and dragged me back into our room, gently guiding me to sit. When vision returned to my black eye, I saw that Naruto was looking at me and smiling. Given more time with him, I probably would've been able to fall in love with his smile, too. Maybe I already had, and I simply refused to admit it. Probably.

"Just relax," instructed Naruto, raising his hand so that I shot a critical glance at the eyeliner stick in one of his hands. In the other, he held my eye-shadow pallet that held various shades of black. Naruto had bought me that as a birthday gift the year we first met. I couldn't help thinking when he had handed it to me that it was one of the most appropriate gifts I had ever received. I watched as he dusted one of the eye-shadow applicators in a gray-based color. God help me, what had I subjected myself to?

As if he sensed my discomfort, Naruto looked at me and said, "Trust me," running his fingers over my eyes so that I had no choice but to close them. I also liked his hands. I had a thing for hands though, always looking at them whenever I met someone new, but no one's hands ever compared to Naruto's. His were perfect. He had nicely formed fingernails, and long, slender digits, and suddenly I was remembering his hand laced with mine as he kissed me on my bed, and then his hand gently trembling as he touched me in the car. What the hell was wrong with me? Anyone else would've forgotten such things by now. Naruto certainly seemed to be over it, anyway. Goddamn him. Goddamn me. Just…Goddamn it all.

"Done," Naruto exclaimed, tearing me from my tumultuous thoughts. Opening my eyes, I hadn't even known he had begun. Shooting him the critical glance this time, I slowly walked to the bathroom to view his work.

Well…Of course, it was perfect. He could do no wrong. "How's it look?" Naruto questioned, appearing in the bathroom beside me and tossing an arm around my shoulder. "I haven't lived with you and learned nothing these three years. It's good, right?"

I couldn't bring myself to tell him how great a job he had done. I couldn't even tell there was a bruise, the way he had blended the blacks and grays so expertly around my eyes. I could only say, "It's all right," before stepping away from his arm and leaving the room.

Naruto stood in the bathroom doorway, looking out at me and frowning a little, like he wanted to say something, but couldn't because of the look on my face. I just stared at him, before sighing and roughly pulling my shoes on. What was wrong with me? What the hell was wrong with me?

Finally taking a step into the room, Naruto opened his mouth to say something, but his phone's ringtone completely threw him off. He actually seemed to regret having to answer it, but as he pulled it out and placed it to his ear, and I walked over and glanced out the window at the car in the drive, I knew he would be telling me soon that Ino had arrived.

Goddamn it all.

/

The party wasn't half-bad. That didn't mean I was happily enjoying myself. Granted, I never happily enjoyed myself anywhere, but that wasn't the point.

It was hosted essentially by Kiba, and held at the Frat house he lived in, so at least we weren't cooped up in some run-down student neighborhood house. But still. At Frat parties, gay people seemed to either disappear, renounce their gay ways for a night, or excuse themselves altogether, so I knew I was not going to get any kisses from hot guys tonight. Which was fine for me, really. It was the first night I had ever truly felt like mellowing out.

Everyone kept commenting on how good Naruto and I looked together—not like _that_, but in general, and that it was great to see us together just like old times. I agreed with them, but I didn't say anything, and Naruto just tossed his arm over my shoulder and said stupid things people would want to hear like how we were long lost twins of hotness, and other equally stupid comments, but when I glimpsed at myself and then at him in the mirrors we passed, we did look pretty damn good. Naruto's usually vibrant eyes seemed a little lackluster, but it could have been the lighting.

Someone—I think it was Ino—tried to push a drink into Naruto's hand, forcing him to pull his arm from my shoulder. The whole affair seemed to span into an intense, concentrated moment, as his hand drifted across the small of my back, tracing down my arm until his fingers just barely dipped into my palm. I looked at him, but he just gave me a small smile and dropped my hand. I felt as if something extremely important had just happened, but no one else seemed to notice.

"Here you are, Naruto," Ino said suggestively, pushing a beer into his hands.

I was starting to worry about another hickey, when Naruto took her hand and put the beer in it. "No thanks, Ino," he replied nicely, and his smile was enough to stop her from being insulted. Instead, she grabbed us both by the arms and pulled us over to the snack table. We all took a seat with everyone else who was there, and I ate a few chips, but for the most part wasn't hungry. Naruto looked at me worriedly a few times, but I indicated with a subtle nod that I was fine.

But I wasn't fine. Ino was quite obviously flirting with Naruto, and she did it so that everyone knew it, too. They may have been going out for all anyone else knew, and a lot of girls that naturally gravitated toward Naruto immediately left when they caught sight of the close pair. First she had her hand glued to his arm, like some twisted form of a First Lady. That would've been fine if her other hand hadn't been resting on his kneecap. Then she laid she head on his shoulder and looked up into his eyes whenever he talked to her, quite obviously asking for a kiss. I don't know what I would've done had he actually given her one. Probably nothing, because that's what I had done all the other times. I wasn't supposed to care. If droves of girls flirted with Naruto, that wasn't supposed to be my concern. Why did I care now?

A girl I didn't know came and sat in the empty seat beside me, offering me a drink which I actually accepted. It was just soda, and I was feeling a little dehydrated, so I figured it wouldn't hurt, but then the poor girl thought I was interested in her and wouldn't leave me alone. She just kept talking, and she was sweet enough, but she was starting to get annoying, and before I knew it, I was leaning my face in my hand simply struggling not to kick her, and when a laugh sounded not too far away, I was not surprised to see Naruto covering his mouth and looking at me in such a way that I almost kicked him too. At least he seemed a little happier. He even gave me a look of sarcasm that congratulated me on the girl by my arm. I restrained myself from rolling my eyes.

When Ino put her hand further up on Naruto's leg, I seemed to forget everything else and focus solely on it. I couldn't draw my eyes away. The girl beside me told me something, to which I mumbled an inaudible reply, and she finally seemed to give up and leave. When I looked at Naruto, he hadn't seemed to notice, until his eyes jumped downward and I realized her hand was stroking his inner thigh. Forget her artistic abilities; I could have kicked her as well. Hard. Naruto politely moved her hand, but a few seconds later, it was practically on his crotch.

I didn't realize until it was pinching my hand that I had been slowly crushing my pop can. Tossing it onto the table with a mounting pile of aluminum, I begrudgingly glanced once more at Ino's hand, before Naruto caught my eye. He smirked a bit, and I glared, and his smirk only widened.

I was about to get up and leave when Ino spoke up. "Naruto, it's too bad you're going to lose your memories. You'll let me take care of you, right?"

I think my glare darkened by several degrees. Naruto's smirk faded, replaced only by a weak grin. "If you want," he kindly replied.

Kiba glided by at that moment and jokingly told her to leave him alone. But the damage had been done. The rest of the people at the table started to converse about Naruto's condition, and those who didn't know about it—even those who didn't know him—talked about it and ooed and awwed. Pretty soon, everyone was chitchatting about it, and Naruto just sat back and smiled, occasionally answering questions but staying quiet for the most part.

It made me sick. There it was again—that futile resignation. Even though there was nothing that could be done, I got mad, and I got mad at Naruto, because I couldn't hate an illness. An illness didn't walk around, and laugh, and talk to me, and confuse be by almost feeling me up, so all I could do was default my frustration onto the one who was probably suffering the most. I really was a horrible person. In an internal rush of anger, I stood up from the table and politely excused myself. A polite excuse meant I left without saying anything impolite, by the way.

Naruto actually surprised me by catching up with me and cutting me off before I could get very far. "Everything okay?" he asked warily, placing his hand on my bicep.

"Ino will be looking for you," I said flatly, voice still conveying some of my annoyance.

"Forget about Ino," he said, trying to laugh it off. I could tell it took considerable effort to do so. I wondered if he missed her hand on his crotch and roughly pushed his away.

"Don't touch me," I angrily told him. "Who knows what you might do."

I shouldn't have said it, and I knew I shouldn't have said it, but the words came before I could stop them. Naruto looked as if I had struck him, and all I could do was look away.

"I told you I was sorry," he said after a moment. "What more do I have to do?"

Why couldn't I say what I really meant? Why couldn't I tell him how I truly felt? Maybe I didn't know either of these things. Maybe I knew, but I didn't want to accept it. "Just leave me alone," I told him quietly, walking away before he could say anything else.

/

I didn't see him for the next two hours, and for some crazy reason, I didn't leave the party. I just meandered quietly about, wordlessly observing as people became more and more intoxicated and, likewise, exponentially crazier. I don't know why I didn't leave. I didn't talk to many people, and I was bored out of my mind, but most of all I felt like a complete asshole. As much as I cared to deny it, I had no business treating Naruto the way I had, hastily displacing my irritation onto him like an immature child. The next time I saw Ino, she was seconds away from dancing topless on a table, and Naruto was nowhere near her. He might've gone home, but when I saw Kiba, he told me before I had a chance to ask that Naruto was somewhere out back. About ten minutes later, I had somehow managed to weave through the large crowd of people, and had finally come to the back of the house. Naruto wasn't difficult to find.

He was sitting on the porch in the dark, and it would've been difficult to see him were it not for his mop of blond hair. Everyone else at the party must've been too inebriated to notice. He was sitting with his legs pulled to his chest, and I might've thought he was looking at the stars were there any in the sky. He was looking at nothing again—or at least at that place that I couldn't see.

Pushing open the screen door, I walked out beside him and took a seat. He didn't really say anything at first, but I knew he knew it was me.

"Weird night," he said quietly. Then, a little more positively, he said, "You didn't have to stay." He was looking at me now, blue eyes clearly visible in the darkness. Despite his best attempts at a smile, he looked overwhelmingly sad.

"I'm sorry," I told him, looking down at my lap and scrunching my face a little in the difficulty of admitting I was wrong. "I shouldn't have said what I said."

Naruto laughed a little to himself and turned back toward the sky. He never could stay upset with me for very long, even when I wanted him to. "You were right," he said with a minute shake of his head. "I shouldn't have touched you…any of those times. I don't really know what got into me."

"Naruto—"

"Do you know what I'm most afraid of? What I have nightmares about? What I'm the most scared of in the whole world?" Glancing at his lap, he let his legs hang over the edge of the porch, before glancing at me again. I didn't know what to say. This was the one thing I had never learned about him. "I don't want to end up alone." He laughed a little again, like it was something to be ashamed of, and I couldn't help but wonder how someone so loved by everyone could ever fear loneliness. But I supposed someone could be constantly surrounded by people and still be alone.

"Naruto," I said again, and he didn't cut me off this time. "You won't end up alone." The one thing I would have changed about myself, were it actually possible, would be to be more suited to cheering people up. I usually didn't care, but I really would've given anything to make Naruto feel better in that moment.

"Who knows?" was all he said in reply.

It made sense that ending up alone was his worst fear, though. He had told me long ago that his parents had abandoned him in an alleyway, and no one had ever adopted him because he was too rowdy. He laughed when he told me the story, but there was an irremovable pain in his eyes that only a blind person couldn't have seen. Though I could only see his profile, I could tell it was there again, but, like when he had disclosed the story then, I didn't know what I could do for him now.

"Are you afraid…" I spoke up after we sat for a while in silence, "…of what will happen to you?" I couldn't help but feel like Ino, asking questions that were none of my business.

Naruto looked at me and smiled feebly. "Terrified."

He looked back into the yard, into nothing, and when I laid my hand on his arm, I don't think he expected it, because he jumped a little, glancing quickly at my hand. "I'll be there," I told him, voice almost a whisper. With that same weak smile just barely curving the corners of his lips up, he took my hand into his and studied it all over, like it was some sort of specimen.

"I always liked your hands," he told me, sadness in his voice dissipating as time passed. I wanted to tell him I felt the same way about his, but as always, I stayed silent. His touch was warm, spreading up my arm a bit as his fingers played with my hand. Flattening our palms together, his smile was more genuine when he saw that they were roughly the same size. I wanted to say something to the affect that he was easily amused, but the words died on my tongue when he laced our fingers together for a brief moment, running his thumb over the back of my hand. When he let it go finally, he turned it over and traced the lines on my palm. The feeling of his finger moving over my skin was enough to make my heart start racing, fluttering wildly against my ribs. But I couldn't pull my hand away. And Naruto couldn't seem to let go either as our eyes locked, and I frowned at him a little, and the smile seemed to fall from his face. I didn't understand it at first, until he placed his other hand on my hip and started to lean toward me, stopping when his face was only a few inches from mine. He was striking there in the darkness, moonlight playing off his eyes like sapphires, and even though I didn't know what would become of this, I curled my hand loosely in the front of his shirt, silently telling him it was okay.

"Naruto, _there_ you are," Ino drawled, tripping out onto the porch. "I've been looking for you everywhere, mister."

Naruto glanced up at her and smiled, shaking his head as he got to his feet. My hand immediately felt cold when he let it go. "Hey there, Ino."

Shikamaru glimpsed out the screen door, sighing and joining us on the porch. I got to my feet to quietly greet him. "I'm sorry about this, Naruto," he sighed again. "She's been causing a bit of a riot for everyone tonight."

"No, I'm not," Ino countered hotly, pivoting toward him and stumbling a bit. "Besides, Naruto was about to kiss Gaara. I had to interfere." Another one of Naruto's amused laughs rang out, and I was glad _he_ found this funny, because it was his sexuality that would be questioned were Ino to remember any of this in the morning.

Shikamaru grabbed her by the arm, carefully steadying her. "Ok, ok. You've obviously had too much to drink." He gave Naruto and me a weary glance. "Naruto's about to leave, so say goodbye."

For a moment, I thought the platinum-blonde really might cry. "Bye-bye, Naruto," she sniffed. Turning toward me, she pouted her lower lip cutely, making it impossible for me to hate her. "Bye, Gaara. You're really lucky."

"Ok, that's enough," Shikamaru tugged on her arm. "Let's go back inside now." He pushed her into the house, before stopping at the door and facing us again. "Sorry about that, you guys. She's a little smashed."

Naruto just waved him off with a smile as if it were nothing. "Don't worry about it. We're gonna get out of here anyway."

"See ya later, then," he told Naruto. Giving me a nod, he rushed back into the house to, no doubt, restrain Ino from doing anything stupid.

Chuckling, Naruto put his hand on the small of my back and prompted me to start walking back toward the apartment. His hand never left my back. I could focus on little else.

/*/

I was fooling myself if I said I didn't expect what was coming the moment we stepped foot into the apartment. We had said nothing on the way over, but we walked much closer together than was necessary. Our shoulders and arms and hands continually brushed, and I knew Naruto was aware of it, because he had a strange look on his face, like he was trying to stop himself from doing something he might regret.

Naruto unlocked the door, walking in behind me, and when I raised my hand to turn on the light in the front room, he placed his hand over mine, flattening it simply against the wall. I turned to ask him what was up, and he pushed me to very same wall he had my hand against, so that I could only see what was over his shoulder, and even that was difficult to see in the dark.

Naruto's breath was warm and measured, but it didn't smell of alcohol, so I couldn't attribute his actions to that. I could only figure that he was finally taking me up on his conquest of curiosity. But that was fine with me. I was tired of beating myself up over it all, and maybe I wanted it, too. I think there was a part of me that always wondered what it would be like to be with Naruto like this.

I turned toward him slightly to ask him a question, and my lips brushed his neck a bit causing me to forget whatever I was going to say for the second time that night. I felt him uncover my hand, bringing both of his own up and over my back, before sliding them back down. Though there was a layer of fabric between his hands and skin, the gesture was still enough to make me go a little weak in the knees. I gripped my hands on his hips, and he pulled back to look with a scared look in his eyes. As I turned my head to stare back at him, I realized it wasn't so much fear as it was a silent entreaty to go further. I still couldn't seem to bring myself to actually say anything, so I simply reached down and traced a random trail toward his pants. He might've smirked a bit, I couldn't be sure, but he pulled my hands away, pinning them to the wall with a gentle show of force, before he slowly unbuttoned the three buttons of my shirt—well, _his_ shirt, but I forgot the details during the actual exchange.

It was weird, because we remained silent during the beginning stages of it all, but I supposed that that was because people usually kissed during the undressing parts, and what we were doing was based simply on the act and not the emotions, so lip-contact was unnecessary. That didn't stop it from being weird, though.

*When Naruto pulled my shirt off, discarding it somewhere on the floor, I could tell it was probably weird seeing an upper body without breasts, like he didn't quite know what to do with it. This was more of an experience for him than me, so I let him just stare at me for a while, despite the fact that it made me uncomfortable. I thought he was about to turn tail and run, when he placed his hands on my stomach and slowly dragged them upwards. They stopped on my nipples, and I flinched a bit because his hands were cold, but as he gently pinched and explored them, a steady heat seemed to flood from the area travelling straight to my groin.

Naruto brought his left hand to rest on my shoulder, while his right pressed gently across my sternum. Even in the dark, I could tell he was smiling. "Your heart's beating fast," he whispered gently, and suddenly his eyes were that beautiful, moonlit cobalt. Taking one of my hands, he slipped it under his shirt, sliding it up his bare skin to rest in roughly the same area. The rhythmic _thump-thump _of his heart beat on beneath my palm, even faster than my own quickened pace. "Mine, too," he told me, voice almost an inaudible whisper.

I wanted to tell him he was stupid, but again the words just wouldn't come out. Removing my hand from his shirt, I took hold of his hand and pulled him over to the couch. I really didn't know how much longer I would be able to remain standing. Would Naruto really go all the way? When he took a seat beside me on the couch, and a small uncomfortable silence fell between us—each refusing to look in the other's eyes, I really thought it was over. And then Naruto leaned over and kissed me.

I can't say that I've ever been more caught off guard by something. Naruto leaned toward me a little, putting his hand on one side of my face and tilting it toward his, and then his lips were on mine, pressing with the smallest amount of force before he pulled back to look me in the eyes. I'm sure I must've looked a little shocked, a little confused by what he was doing. It was the first time he had kissed me in a moment of lucidity. This was not supposed to be part of the plan, so what was he trying to accomplish with it?

Naruto put his hand on the side of my face, thumb gently caressing my cheek. "Maybe I have some things I don't want to regret either."

*A cross between a frown and look of uncertainty passed over my face, but Naruto silenced anything I might've said with another kiss. The first few were simple presses of our mouths together, nothing more, as we sat together in silence on the small couch. Then, by degrees, and very gradually, the kiss deepened. Naruto was the one who did it, slowly coaxing my mouth open with his tongue, and I realized that this was Naruto's second French kiss with a another boy. But my gender did not seem to hinder him. He was, by far, the best kisser I had ever had the pleasure of knowing, and if it was possible to come by a kiss alone, then Naruto would be the one to do it. I didn't even fight as I usually did to take the lead; I didn't even care. I didn't even like kissing, but I could've kissed him forever. There wasn't even anything overtly erotic about it. There was just something about the way his tongue moved in and out of my mouth that nearly turned me to putty in his hands. I clutched feebly at his shirt, but I couldn't seem to bring myself to grip it, and Naruto pulled my hands away again, leaning me back onto the seat of the couch.

I can't explain how unreal it all felt. His slow and steady kiss seemed to make time stop, and one of his hands was still on the side of my face, while the other was raking down my bare side and trying to find a place to rest. It just didn't seem like it could be happening, a kind of daydream blurring the lines between true and false.

When his fingers brushed my belt buckle, it became real. The _clink_ of his fingernails of cold steel seemed to draw us both harshly from the simplicity of kissing and into some bigger realm of possibility and reality. Naruto pulled back, looking hesitantly at me again, and I just stared at him before saying, "You don't have to," and Naruto told me, "I _want_ to," and suddenly I was pulling his mouth back down to mine. I think I threw caution to the wind in that moment, and so did he, because suddenly he was kissing me, and I felt his fingers unfastening my belt and undoing my fly, and then his tongue was in my mouth again nearly driving me insane, and the kiss was suddenly becoming more fast-paced, more passionate, more urgent, and suddenly so was my heartbeat as Naruto finally undid my pants and slipped his hand under my boxers and onto bare skin. I unconsciously broke the kiss, taking in a sharp breath and gripping his collar and nearly pulling him flush against me as I felt his hand finally touch my penis.

"Is this…okay?" he asked, voice nearly a whisper. There was enough of a waver in it for me to know he was just as scared as I was about all this. All I could do was nod my head against him.

It was awkward for us both, as this was my friend of two-plus years with his hand in my pants, and I'm sure Naruto must've been a little uneasy about going _this_ far with another guy, but gradually his hand began to move. He quite clearly did not know what he was doing, but he was still making me hard. Despite having the same parts, there's a big difference between touching yourself and touching your roommate who is also a male. But still, I couldn't seem to let go of his collar, and I felt myself starting to tremble as his hand started to move faster and faster, along with my breathing which wouldn't slow down. Soon, I was clenching my teeth and burying my face in his shoulder, and Naruto wrapped his other arm around me and held me close as if he wasn't going to let anything bad happen to me, and I was starting to feel like I might cry again.

I came instead, body tensing up as I jerked upward into both his hand and body. As I collapsed onto the sofa, Naruto looked down at me with concern until he saw that I was all right, and suddenly he was kissing me again. Goddamn. After a little more of that, enough to successfully arouse me once more, Naruto pulled back and just stared at me for a little while. I wanted to ask what he was thinking, but I still couldn't seem to find the words. I wanted to run my fingers through his hair, but my hands seemed glued to his shirt.

"God," he said, not so much to a particular god, but more out of a kind of awe. "I think—well, I don't know what to think." His smile was bittersweet. And then I was really puzzled when my leg brushed his erection. My biggest concern about the whole sleeping with a guy thing was how Naruto would bring himself to actually be turned on enough to do it. In my mind, the thought of sleeping with a girl was a serious turn-off, so I could only imagine that for Naruto, sleeping with a guy would be the same. But he was aroused. Somehow, he had been sexually stimulated by all this, but I could only conjecture that it was the foreign element of it all, the unknown.

Looking at him then, he really was one of the most important people to me in the world. I don't know what that said about me, because looking at the two of us, well, one would only have to look to see that we probably wouldn't be compatible. And we probably wouldn't have, were it not for Naruto. He could be really stupid, and clueless, and even childish, but he didn't give up on me. He never once gave up on me.

I pulled his face to mine again, and we kissed a little more, but it wasn't so much for the kiss as it was to give me time to take off his shirt and undo his pants. Of course, his shirt had fifty-thousand buttons, so by the time I got around to his pants, my hands were exhausted. I opened up my legs a little and pulled Naruto between them, and even if we both had our pants on for the most part, I could still feel him through both of our jeans. I felt him smile a little against my mouth, and I wished for just one second he was in my position, trying to take off someone's pants with a hard-on pressing into your thigh. It wasn't exactly easy. When I finally had his pants open, the back of my hand brushed his erection and he leaned into the touch, a small moan escaping his lips. If I hadn't already been turned on, that alone would've done it. The only thing that stopped me from giving him a hand job was the fact that we might as well just get to what we were going to do in the first place.

When we broke the kiss to pull off his undershirt, I turned onto my stomach so I didn't have to face him as I told him the details of gay sex. Raising up onto my knees, I moved to pull off my pants the rest of the way, but Naruto surprised me by doing it himself. The whole process of events that followed had a lot of potential to be extremely awkward, but Naruto did everything I told him to do without fussing, even asking me with genuine worry if I was all right a couple of times, and it wasn't long before I was ready for him to enter me.

But I'll be damned if it didn't still hurt. I felt Naruto brace his hands on my waist and dropped my face onto my arms as he slowly pushed into me from behind. That was probably the most awkward moment—when we were finally connected, Naruto inside of me and breathing really hard, and my heart beating faster than I ever remembered it beating, and the dazed realization that you and another person become one for this miniscule moment in time. Soon, the stupid tears were coming out of my eyes again, and I could feel myself shaking, but Naruto just wrapped his arms around me from behind and held me as tightly as he could as he kept telling me it would be okay. He almost made me want to believe it. When my weird mood passed, Naruto kissed my back and then my neck and then he started to move.

I've had sex before. A choice few times, things led to other things, and before I knew it, I was either in someone else, or they were in me. But with Naruto, it felt like I was making love for the first time. There were a million reasons why; it was in the way he held me, the way he spoke to me through it all, the way his hands seemed to be all over me. I felt him moving, felt his thumping heart against my back, and that mounting tension within myself that seemed to build continuously through it all. There was also that lingering fear in the back of my mind, that ever-present caution sign that told me to be careful, because honestly, what in the world were we doing? There was no way we wouldn't regret this later. But for now, I was content.

When I came, I bit my lip so hard it almost bled. Naruto would not stop shaking. He didn't pull out of me either. For a long time, he just lay on top of me, face buried in the nape of my neck and arm curled around one of my shoulders. I thought he was asleep, until he slowly disengaged his body from mine, eliciting a drowsy moan from the back of my throat. The moonlight was spilling in through the blinds, throwing vertical spears of light across the room, and I would've been content to sleep face down on the couch had not Naruto dragged me around, curling my arms around his back. I mumbled something, some weak protest, but he kissed me again, and I wondered what he was doing, because he had already slept with me and got what he had wanted. But the kiss was nice, a fitting end to it all, and when his lips left mine, and he put a hand into my hair, gently massaging my scalp and lulling me toward sleep as he pressed another kiss to the top of my head, all I really wondered was just how long I had been in love with him and not known it.

That was my biggest regret.

/

It's weird to realize you're in love with someone, or at least to finally accept it. When I woke up the next morning, a vertical spear of gold shining directly into my eyes, that was the first thing I could think about. But I didn't feel any different, didn't feel as if a large weight had been taken off my shoulders, didn't feel like I was lifted up to where I belonged, as some weird song proclaimed; I just felt blasé, because if I wasn't blasé about it, I knew I would only feel sad, because I had gone and fallen in love with someone who was fated to forget all about me. How does someone cope with that? How long does it take to erase someone from your heart willingly? It just seemed so cruel that it took so long to get to know someone, but only an instant to forget them. Maybe Naruto would wake up and have already forgotten. Just how long would I remain a part of his memories, before I, too, faded away?

Naruto's naked body sprawled on top of mine was the second thing I thought about. His ear was pressed to my chest, but his face was turned a little so that the corner of his mouth just barely touched my skin. I was curious as to what time it was, but at the same time, I didn't care. It was Sunday, so I had the day to both think about how stupid we both were for having done what we had done, and how on earth I would finish my homework before tomorrow. But for now, Naruto was on top of me, and I was beneath him, and I was all right with that.

It wasn't long before Naruto woke up, stretching a little until his hands registered that they were touching someone else's skin, and that alone seemed to snap him to full awakening. He looked up at me, and I thought he was about to freak out, but he just smiled and cross his arms on my chest, tilting his head a little to the side as our eyes locked.

"You could have woken me up," he said, sleepiness still in his voice and in his lidded eyes and in his unkempt hair, all these elements molding together and making him an extremely attractive person to wake up next to. "Were you up long?"

"Not long," I looked away.

"How do you feel?"

"Fine," I said quietly. A little angrier, I faced him and said, "I'm not a blushing virgin, you know."

He laughed, the rumble transferring onto my chest, and when he sat up, I was cold. "I know, I know," he said. Picking up his button-up from the floor, it took everything in me not to protest when he put it on me, fastening a few buttons in front. "Believe it or not, I am."

"What?"

"Well, _was_," he continued. "Sex is sex, no matter who it's with, so I'm not a virgin anymore." I think I stared at him for a good sixty seconds before he pinched my cheek and smiled. "Thanks."

"For what?"

"Last night."

And I was mad again. "Did you get what you wanted?"

He looked shocked for a minute, before that kind smile was on his face again. "I didn't mean it like that. I'm glad my first time was with you. Weirdly enough, I can't think of a better person who I would've rather been with."

I think my face fought between any number of expressions before settling with one of subtle surrender. "Me either," I told him, voice quiet as my eyes left his face, and suddenly his hand was on my cheek again, and his mouth was slanting over my own as he pressed our lips together. It felt like goodbye. When Naruto pulled back, his fingers were resting on my neck, and his thumb was gently smoothing over my cheek. There was a really big lump in my throat that I kept trying to swallow, but it just kept coming back, and I felt that stupid prickling behind my eyes, and I really could've slapped Naruto in that moment.

"That's a more proper thanks, don't you think?" Naruto inquired, messing up my hair and smiling at me. And then I watched as his smile faded, until it was nothing, and he was no longer looking at me, and the room may as well have been cast in darkness. "I don't know…exactly how I feel about you," he said quietly. "I know I love you as a friend…I'll _always _love you like that, but I don't know if it's something more." He looked at me, and the sadness in his eyes was overwhelming. "I know it's unfair to tell you this," he smiled a little here, "especially considering the circumstances, but I think it's only fair that you know, maybe, why I did what I did. _I _don't even really know." Resting his hands on my shoulders, he pulled me against his chest. "Just know that you're one of the most important people in my life. I'm so happy I met you."

I don't know how I prompted myself to speak, but when I did, my voice was shaking, and it only made the lump in my throat bigger. "Why are you doing this?"

"Better now when I can…than never. I'm going to start forgetting a lot here soon, if what the doctors said is right. I just don't want to have any regrets." He let out a soft laugh that made me want to cry. "Especially not about this particular crazy redhead I know." That was just like him, trying to find the good in a situation that could only be described as bad, trying to make sure that others didn't have to hurt…at least not as much as he had. "Just know that I love you, okay?"

"Yeah," I managed to say.

After a moment, Naruto was laughing quietly again and rubbing me on the back. "What about me," he faked a pout. "You love me too, right?"

"Yeah." The tears started rolling down my cheeks again and I couldn't stop them. "I love you."

I don't know that Naruto knew the full extent of what I was saying when I told him that, but that was all right. Maybe he knew that if we talked about it, it would just make it more difficult for the both of us. But that was fine with me. Thinking back, that was the last day that Naruto was so much himself, laughing and teasing me all day, and actually coercing me to put my homework off so we could just spend time together. It was like any other normal day, but it was also one of the best days of my life, because it would be seven months later, to the day, that Naruto would forget about me. But we had those seven months.

There's not really much to say about the time that passed between that moment and the last time I saw him. For the most part, things were the same, and some days were better than others, but other days, I could see Naruto struggling to remember things, like how to answer a complex math problem or where the light switch was. It was tough. I started driving him to school because I was worried he might forget how to walk, but the doctors told me that was a long way off. I just wanted to be careful. He was still pretty much himself when the year ended and we said our goodbyes to head home for the summer, but I found myself calling him at least once a week, if he didn't call me first, and we were sure to stay in touch. He always told me he was all right, but I knew better, and I'm pretty sure he knew I knew, too.

When I saw him at the start of our senior year, he told me he probably wouldn't be able to finish off the term. I just looked at him like he was speaking gibberish and told him I would help him as much as I could, and that things would be fine. He just smiled. He stopped making breakfast on Saturday mornings, and that was tough, because I knew he had forgotten that he had always done it. Likewise, he didn't meet me at the library on Tuesdays and Thursdays anymore, but I told myself this was all right because I would just work with him in the apartment. I told myself a lot of things during those seven months. Most of them were lies, but they made it possible for me to face each new day with confidence. Still, some days I would just be really mad, and other times, most often than not, I would be irrevocably sad.

During one of these moments, Naruto looked at me and said reassuringly, "It's not like I'm dying."

"You may as well be," was all I said in reply.

I really felt like he was dying, except it was worse, because he was dying right in front of my eyes, everyday, losing a small part of himself. Losing me. Sometimes I was just mean, and I knew it was wrong, but I would occasionally ask him about a moment he couldn't remember, and he would tell me he didn't know what I was talking about, so I would just keep asking and asking until finally he grew upset and left the room. I don't know why I did it. Maybe I felt that if I asked him enough, he really would remember.

One of the worst days was the day he actually looked at Iruka, his foster father, whom I knew he had cared very deeply for, and asked him who he was. I was there when it happened, and Iruka could only look at me with a small smile, telling me quietly, "Take care of him for me," before he left with a pained expression.

But if he could forget about Iruka, I knew it was only a matter of time before he forgot about me. And I was right. The doctors, whom I had come to know quite well during our senior year, took me aside during one of Naruto's checkups and told me that Naruto was holding onto me. I didn't know what they meant until they informed me that Naruto was subconsciously holding onto memories of me, something that rarely happened, but it was causing him to lose memories of other people and things faster, thus tiring him and his brain out. They seemed to look at me very slowly, as if unsure of what to say.

"So what do you want me to do?" I flatly asked, crossing my arms and trying not to glare too openly.

One of the lady doctors put her hand on my shoulder and smiled compassionately. "Try and help him to forget."

Why did it have to be me that kept the memories? Why did it have to be me that made him forget? I just couldn't understand it; I just couldn't understand anything anymore. But I did what I could, because I didn't want Naruto to hurt anymore than he already was. We were slowly drifting apart anyways. I had Sakura start alternating with me to watch him when, at one point, he stopped going to school; he just couldn't keep up, and I started seeing him less and less, but when I did, he would always get really excited and call my name and ask why I was avoiding him. I didn't know what to say. I just told him he was stupid and didn't know anything. I really was a horrible person.

There was a particular day when I was meeting with Naruto for the day and I could tell by the look in his eyes that it took a particularly long time to remember just who I was. Sakura had called me two weeks prior to that moment, crying and telling me that Naruto had finally forgotten her. What do you tell someone in a moment like that?

Naruto and I hung out for the day, but I mostly did homework while he walked around the apartment trying to find out just why it seemed so familiar, especially the couch.

"Stop messing around," I would say every once in a while, and he would flinch and take a seat beside me, before he was soon standing and looking at something else again. That night, as I lay in my bed, and Naruto lay in his just like old times, I stared at the ceiling with my arms crossed loosely over my stomach.

"Naruto?" I said quietly, uncertain if he was still awake or not.

"What?" he replied, and I pictured him lying almost exactly like I was, except with his arms behind his head. When I turned to look at him, he was.

"Don't forget about me."

"I won't," Naruto yawned out, stretching and shifting onto his side.

"You will."

He forgot about me the next day. When he woke up, the look in his eyes was more than I could take, so I left the apartment and called Sakura to come and get him. And I never saw him again for quite a while. I talked to a few people as time went by, only to check up on him, but they all said he was doing just fine. He was a fighter, and he fought the condition to the very end when he finally had to be put on a ventilator to help him to breathe. I couldn't have seen him like that anyway. I would've broken down. The last time I spoke to anyone, it was Sakura, and she was telling me that he was expected to make a fast recovery and would be in mental rehabilitation soon. I told her that was great.

By that time, his smile was a distant memory.

/

My footsteps seemed uncertain and slow as they fell quietly across the white linoleum of the hospital. I had been about to head to a seminar when I received a call from Sakura, asking me to come and drop by the hospital to see Naruto. I had nearly dropped the phone, my fingers trembling as I asked her why, but she just said it was a surprise and wouldn't tell me.

I was about halfway to his room, when I pivoted and detoured into the nearest men's bathroom. Thankfully, there was no one else in the room, and I braced my hands on the sink, taking a few deep breaths and looking into the mirror. I looked relatively the same; I was still young. It had only been three years, so there was no way Naruto would remember me, but for some reason, I still wanted to make sure I looked all right. Twenty-three saw me with only a few subtle differences; my hair was a little longer, brick-red bangs falling into my eyes; I was a little taller, but just a little—maybe I had grown a fourth of an inch; and my eyes probably held the biggest difference—still blue-green, but with an unalterable sadness lingering in their depths. It was cliché, but true. I had never been able to get rid of it, never even known it was there, until people around me started asking if there had been a death in the family or some other unfortunate event that I couldn't get off my mind. My brother and sister had been especially concerned, but every time they asked, I told them I was fine. I was still young, or so people told me, working on my Master's and soon to start my Doctorate, but I felt much older than twenty-three. I couldn't explain it. I just felt tired all the time, like I had already seen the best years of my life and was simply waiting for death. I know it sounds horrible, but that's how it was. As soon as I ensured that my sneakers, jeans, and t-shirt would suffice, I took one final breath and stepped back into the hall.

I heard Naruto before I actually saw him. His laugh spilled out into the hallway, nearly making my heart stop. When I got to the door, I could only stand there with a hand on the frame, watching him as he joked and used his natural charm on one of the female nurses in the room. He didn't look very different. For a moment, it was like nothing had changed.

"Hey!" I was torn from my small moment of awe as Sakura came up from behind me, tapping me on the shoulder and flashing a kind smile. "Long time no see." I nodded at her, and she looked toward Naruto with a skeptical grin. "Some people never change."

"Yeah," was all I could muster.

"He still doesn't remember me," she said, voice tinted with a hint of sadness, "or anyone for that matter, but we're working on it. He might not, but we're remaining positive. He really is recovering fast."

"I see."

"Don't I know you?"

I broke away from Sakura, snapping my face toward Naruto as if he had highly insulted me. He was looking right at me, tilting his head a little and blinking his blue eyes with the same expression he wore when we first met. I didn't know what to say. My throat seemed to close, and words wouldn't come out.

He stood, and the nurses moved away to allow him to walk toward me, looking at him and then each other with a curious confusion. He was still just a little taller than me as he stopped right in front of me. I felt myself wanting to move toward him, so I was sure to brace my hand even tighter on the frame.

"Gaara…right?" he asked, furrowing his brows slightly as I watched him struggle with the right expression.

I'm pretty sure my eyes widened a little, and I looked at Sakura, but she just shrugged, clearly at a loss herself, so all I could do was look back at Naruto. "Right," I replied, finally bringing myself to speak. "…How did you know?"

He laughed and rubbed my shoulder, looking like he didn't quite know why he was doing it either, but simply felt like it was the right thing to do. "You must've made a good impression."

I think Sakura was crying, but if she was, she did a good job of hiding it. She motioned to the nurses, who shuffled out of the room, and before Sakura left, she told me she'd give us some time alone. I thanked her, and she was gone, the door closing as I took a step away from it, bringing me closer to Naruto.

When I glanced back at him, he had his hand extended and a sheepish grin on his face. "I know you already know me, but this seems like the right thing to do. So, I'm Naruto. It's really nice to meet you."

After looking at it blankly for a moment, I took his hand and shook it. "I'm Gaara." Loosening my hand, I expected him to let it go, but he held onto it for a few more seconds, and when I looked up at him, he was looking down at me with an unreadable expression, like he was trying to remember something that he probably should've known. With a nervous chuckle, he released my hand, and I brought it to rest on my arm as I waited for the memory of his fingertips to fade.

"Sorry about that," he told me in earnest, motioning toward the two chairs in the room. "Where should we begin?"

When it came down to it, there were two benefits to what happened to Naruto. I was able to face reality and do the things I might never have been able to do under different circumstances. And now, I would be able to start over with him without making any mistakes. It was bittersweet, but it was all we had.

"Let's start from the beginning."

I'll do everything right, this time.

/**And:Restart**

**A/N: **Well, there ya go. The story could end here. You can be done with it. But. I'm a loser who quietly grumbles over endings like these because I would much rather read about a nice ending rather than imagine it myself. So. There is now a fourth chapter that serves as the epilogue/sequel. Read it if you wish, or be done with this literary tidbit now. Whatever you decide, thanks for seeing this through to the end. Bittersweet, but that's life, isn't it?


	4. Stand by me, Part 1 of 3

**/And:Reboot** – "Stand by [me]"

The sound of my bedroom door straining against ancient hinges drew me blearily from sleep, like a hand gently tugging on mine, telling me softly, softly, _Come here, come here; won't you come with me? _But I didn't want to go. I just wanted to sleep. All I ever wanted to do anymore was sleep. But still, that hand lightly held mine, pulling ever so softly, and I felt fingers lacing gracefully with my own as a warm smile seemed to manifest itself in my thoughts. I tried to will it away, but it simply wouldn't leave, and when I finally did open my eyes to try and blot out my thoughts, blue irises were sparkling down at me.

"Naruto."

"Hello."

"I miss you."

"You overslept."

"What?"

And then I woke up. I woke up rather angry as well, because the Naruto from my dreams was no longer the Naruto I met with every couple of days. And I wanted the Naruto from my dreams. That's who I was in love with (_was_ being the key word), not the imposter who now inhabited his body. Not the replica who had stolen his hair, voice, eyes, his very _body_. I wanted _that_ Naruto.

Why did I think that somehow things might be the same? Even if he knew my name, this Naruto didn't know _me_. And day by day, I was learning just how much he didn't know. But some twisted part of me was still content with the situation, because Naruto wasn't dead. He was alive; he was well; he was recovering rather quickly. He just wasn't turning into the Naruto I had known. I kept thinking one of these days…one of these days, he's going to look at me and remember. One of these days. I kept thinking that. I'm hopelessly stubborn like that. But one can only reassure their self so many times before the bitterness begins to set in. I could only take so much of that unknowing smile. Each time I saw it, it seemed to push it into my face that _one_ _of these days_ might never come.

It wasn't long before I began to hate this Naruto.

**/**

It also wasn't long before I realized just how thin the line between love and hate really was.

As luck would have it, I was scheduled to meet up with Naruto and Sakura that very same afternoon. I had come to owe a lot to Sakura over the past few months, following my reintroduction into Naruto's life. Even before the reintroduction, I had shouldered most of the burden onto her, not feeling myself strong enough to face Naruto during the worst of the condition. She was with him through it all, in my place, doing what I couldn't do. Yes, she was now a medical student, and so she saw him a lot regardless, but there was no doubt that I could've been there more. God, I was weak. It was no surprise when the pair approached me in the café with glowing smiles. Naruto was holding her hand.

Had she taken my place? Had I _let_ her?

"Gaara!" Naruto called out when our eyes met, throwing up a wave with his free hand and taking a spot in one of the two chairs across from me. Sakura followed suit and sat beside him. "I haven't seen you in a while. How have you been?"

"It's been three days," I said flatly, raising my cup to my lips. Naruto was still holding her hand, their interlinked fingers resting openly on the table. They made a nice couple. Sakura was surely pleased; that much I could tell. She had a flattering flush upon her cheeks, like a newlywed, and I couldn't help thinking that she was approaching marriageable age. Perhaps they would marry. Perhaps Naruto would remember me. Perhaps I would learn to accept reality. One of these days. "I'm fine," I continued, placing my cup on the table. "I don't change."

I didn't find anything wrong with my words, but Naruto seemed to hear them and frown, before he laughed a little and was smiling again and I nearly smacked myself. "That's good to hear," he replied.

His words now seemed so hollow—forced almost. Too friendly, too superficial for my tastes. As I looked at him across the table while he exchanged a few words with Sakura, I could feel that hatred bubbling up, but right behind it, shadowing it almost, was that ever-persistent love. And then I looked at their entwined hands, and I began to see the reality. It would never be the same between us. Naruto wasn't coming back. I was in love with a mere memory, but I knew that as long as this imposter was around me, that blur of love and hate might never dissolve. There was only one solution: I needed to separate myself from him. I needed to stop seeing him. It was the only way.

Naruto excused himself, leaving me with Sakura and pulling me back into the present. I tried to ignore the pang in my chest as I watched his retreating back.

"Naruto's doing so well," Sakura spoke up, placing her hand on my arm for a moment. "I know you worry about him." I wanted to tell her she was wrong, but I didn't feel like lying. She seemed hesitant to continue with what she was going to say next. "…He hasn't remembered anything else, though. In six months, only your name has come back to him."

I saw the pain that flashed across her face at Naruto not having remembered anything about her. Even if Naruto had remembered my name, I could still understand her feelings. "I'm sorry," I quietly told her.

"Don't apologize," she waved me off, a polite grin spreading across her face. Like Naruto, she was good at pretending that nothing was wrong. Maybe they were right for each other. "And anyway, you were the one closest to him; I'd expect nothing less. Whenever you two weren't joined at the hip, you were all he talked about. I probably know much more about you than I should." And I probably would've worried about that statement, had I not slowly been losing my ability to care. But the fact that I still cared, even the slightest bit, was the problem. I needed to not care at all. I needed to tell Sakura I couldn't see him anymore.

"Listen," she said before I had a chance to speak. "I need to ask a favor of you." She correctly understood my silence as an agreement to proceed. "Naruto is starting classes at the university soon." I already didn't like where this was going. "He'll need someone to sort of watch over him, and guide him…be there for him. He'll need a friend."

"He'll have you," I found myself saying, somehow managing to make my voice not sound as bitter as I felt.

"Yes, but I'm a medical student. You know my schedule is rather rigorous. Ups and downs, never knowing when I might be on-call, insane hours. Even now, it's difficult to be with him." Sitting back in her chair, she tucked a few strands of hair behind her ear. "He needs someone other than me." Her pleading green eyes locked onto mine. "He needs you."

"Me." I stared at her in silence for a minute or so. "Why me?"

It was Sakura's turn to stare at me in silence, though her duration of quiet was substantially longer. I wondered what was going on in her mind. "Naruto was your best friend. Even now…even now, you're probably the closest person to him. Take some responsibility for that. He asked for you," she laughed, but I saw the tears threatening to fall from her eyes. For some reason, I felt that they might fall from mine, too. "He asked if he could stay with you. He told me he feels the most like himself with you."

"Why…didn't he ask me himself?"

Sakura laughed again, but it was more of a real laugh this time. "He's a little afraid of you. He thinks you hate him." It seemed this Naruto had psychic abilities. "It's not too hard to see why, though," Sakura added. "You should be a little nicer. He's also having a hard time. Have you ever thought that he might be suffering, too?"

I grimaced a little at her, not because I was offended by her words, but because I saw the truth within them. Still. Naruto living with me? I hadn't had a roommate in three years. I didn't want that connection with anyone else. But could I really live with him again? Could we really share the same living space with such feelings of love and hate swirling dangerously within my heart?

"_Are you afraid…of what will happen to you?"_

"_Terrified."_

"_I'll be there."_

That pang in my heart had returned, but I faced Sakura with a source of unknown strength and told her that it was fine—Naruto could stay with me. She smiled and told me how thankful she was. I told her not to expect a miracle. She just continued to grin at me as Naruto returned, flashing me a warm smile as well before taking his seat. I tried not to glare too darkly at him. Then again, I had also tried to permanently separate myself from him, if only to quell the turbulent feelings surrounding his existence. Funny how all these things were failing.

So much for that.

**/**

Things were not weird between Naruto and me after we had slept together, or at least, they were not as weird as I had thought they would have been. I had just accepted that nothing would ever come of it, and I don't know what Naruto's thoughts were. We almost seemed to avoid the subject. But still, Naruto didn't treat me any differently, and my indifferent attitude certainly never changed.

But things were weird between us now. Or maybe things had always been weird, and I had just never noticed it. I know for a fact that the first month after I met Naruto in the hospital, I was blinded from the truth by my overwhelming relief at seeing him again. I was likewise blinded by my own foolish wishes for Naruto to be the Naruto I had cared so much about. Each time we would meet, I would look at him, seeing that strange form of sadness in his eyes, but I didn't feel bad because I told myself that _tomorrow, he would be Naruto. Today I don't know who he is, but that's all right, because there's always tomorrow._ I hung onto that false hope almost religiously; there was no wonder I was so bitter now. This was supposed to be my second chance, but I was doing all the wrong things. I was supposed to be there for him; I was supposed to do things right. Maybe it wasn't too late to start.

Or maybe it was. Naruto and I did not discuss the details of his moving in with me. He just showed up one Friday afternoon with his bags and his smile, and it took great restraint not to slam the door in his face.

"Hello, hello," he greeted cheerfully, waiting for my okay to come in. I debated not letting him in and saying to hell with it all, before I took a deep breath and stepped aside. It hurt to have him walk in and look around at everything as if he'd never seen it before. But wasn't that my fault? I was the idiot who couldn't let go of the place after three years. It looked almost the same as when Naruto had last been there…when he had uttered those three words I had most feared him to say.

"_Who are you?"_

"Hey, are you okay?" Naruto's concerned tone tore me from my thoughts, and as I focused on him, I saw that familiar look of worry on his face, heard that question that he used to ask me again and again, felt that warmth that spread from his hand which gently grasped my upper-arm. Most of all, I felt the pain. Would this wound ever heal?

I pulled away from him and tried my best to appear calm. "I'm fine."

Naruto didn't look convinced and it only took me a moment to see why. "But you're crying."

I felt my face twist in confusion even as I became aware of the dampness of my cheeks. Still, there was this part of myself that wanted to run into his arms and cry like a child again. He had spoiled me. Would this Naruto accept me into his arms so easily? I couldn't take the chance, because I knew one look of repulsion from him might very well destroy me. But he wore his face so well. Too well.

I saw him reach toward me again and took another step back, wiping my eyes on the back of my sleeve and clearing my throat. "I'm fine," I repeated more firmly. "Just put your stuff wherever."

"But Gaara—"

"I'll be back later," I told him, before slipping out the door.

**/**

A lot of people came to see Naruto over the next few days, and I let them, because if they saw him, it meant that I didn't have to.

I became rather adept at avoiding him. It's amazing how invisible one can become when they truly work at it. And I worked at it. Wherever he was or would be, I was not. I became an adept listener, always listening and picking up enough to know from those he knew where he was or might be going. Even the possibility meant that I could not be there.

It was one thing to say I would be fine if he moved in. It was another thing to actually _be_ fine once it happened.

For the duration of the week during which Naruto moved his accursed things into the apartment, I was practically nonexistent. I stayed away from the place always throughout the better part of the day, never daring to return until the moon had been up and out for several hours. Thankfully, he was an early sleeper. It was tedious at first to schedule my life around him, especially when he was so very present now, but I managed it. And I did manage it.

After classes, I would gather up my necessary books and other utensils and I would disappear into the library or café. The library was a safer bet because Naruto was not yet taking classes and so he really had no business being there. But there were times when I had no choice but to chance the café. I could remain within these two abodes for only so long before I would have to retire back to the apartment. My erratic change in schedule left me more tired and even more moody than usual. Going to bed around 1 a.m. each night and waking around 7 or 8 will do that you. But this was easy. I could do all of this quite easily.

It was pretending that he was invisible that was difficult. There were times when he could not be avoided. I would spot him off and on campus with the friends who had so graciously pulled him back into their lives. I could understand that too, a little. He delighted people. He never let anyone feel left out. In this manner, he had not changed. One night, he came into the café with Kiba, Ino, and Hinata. Hinata was known for being shy and non-talkative; one learned that after a mere five minutes with her. Naruto knew this and yet I still watched as he nudged her with his elbow every so often and grinned, probably after some joke or random comment. The succinct touch meant, _You are included. I have not forgotten about you_. There was something heartbreakingly tender about it, as if he was implying with the contact that in acknowledging another he was also acknowledging himself. It was during times like this that I would begin to notice the shadow that occasionally manifested just behind him—the shadow of _him_. But I was only seeing things, for it was only so long before I would hear that crystalline laugh, like wind dancing through chimes, and something inside of me would begin to twist up, painfully so, until I was away from him again.

This was why I stayed away from him. Not because of our tumultuous past that I alone shouldered—although I'd be lying if I said that that didn't contribute to it—and not because of the hateful love—for that was steadily dying and becoming nothingness. His presence was simply never positive for me. It meant I was not doing something; I was not there. And he could never comprehend what it would mean for me to be there—not because I had lost someone I was interested in romantically, but because I had lost a friend.

I just couldn't. Not when I came home late at night and saw his oblivious, dozing face. Not even when I threw a blanket over that same face so I could sleep in peace. Not when I would pass by him and a group of friends laughing and rollicking together. Not even when he would occasionally catch my eye during such moments and smile a little, albeit it a little awkwardly until I would look away. Not when those rare moments occurred when I would walk into the apartment and find him there, up and awake. Not even when he would stand there uncomfortably, a lopsided grin fighting for dominance on his face as I would pause, caught, before the neurons would begin firing again and I would remember how to walk and how to leave and how to breathe again. And although he never once touched me, I could feel it every time our eyes would meet:

_You are included_, his presence seemed to say._ I have not forgotten about you._

/

I avoided Naruto for one month before the universe turned against me. Considering the fact that the universe had already turned against me, it would be more appropriate to say that it proceeded with a new reign of terror.

I had just left the café and was slipping a notebook into my bag when I heard him laugh. Looking up, there he was, surrounded as always by a small group of people that was steadily making its way toward me on the sidewalk. I could feel that familiar twist of apprehension, but the group was heading away from the apartment which meant I would have at least an hour to rest there and maybe even take a nap. I merely had to make it past him.

At this point, Naruto understood the rules of the game. He knew not to talk to me, and if our eyes met, he knew to look away. It was our unspoken agreement, and he only had to follow the rules and life would be good. He knew this, so when the group passed me by without comment, and I pretended to be preoccupied with the freshly mown lawn, I was not surprised and even a little relieved. It was like a fist slowly relaxed inside my stomach. Life was good.

I'm disappearing, I thought idly. I felt a little bit like a balloon whose only connection to earth is a feeble piece of string. Day by day that string seemed to loosen. One of these days I would up and fly away.

When someone grabbed my arm, I could literally feel my heart skip a beat because the touch seemed to pull me from my airy thoughts, harshly grounding me. I looked at my arm before feeling my face tighten into a glare as I looked up at Naruto. He was flushed, as if he had run several miles to catch up with me.

"Hey," he said, eyebrows set in confusion but a smile still breaking across his face. "Why didn't you say hello?"

I looked down at the grass for a long moment, and Naruto let go of my arm, resting his hand on his hip. The disconnect allowed me to think, and to speak—however unkindly. "I didn't see you."

"Oh," Naruto said, as if he hadn't considered this possibility. I wondered if someone had pointed me out, or if he had seen me himself. I glanced in the direction of his group, and they seemed to be waiting a little impatiently. If I hadn't looked at them, I could've at least pretended that he hadn't seen me. "Where're you headed?" he asked.

"To class," I lied.

"Oh," he said again. I watched him struggle for the right expression: happy; sad; troubled; all three, before he seemed to give up and settle on a tired smile. "Do you want to have dinner tonight? To talk?"

I listened to a car drive by, how the sound was far off at first until all at once it seemed to reach a peak before dying off again. "I have work to do," I said.

Naruto scratched the back of his head and dug the toe of his sneaker into the ground. "Well, I'll let you go then," he said with a sigh and a smile. I adjusted the strap on my bag and continued on my way. I could feel that discomfited shifting of parts inside myself as I left, but it was more from regret than the usual discomfort. Only he could produce such conflicting emotions within me. The bastard.

As if on cue, he cut me off again, his face more set than before, more determined and maybe even a little mad. "How about tomorrow?" he said.

He surprised me so much with this second attack that I felt my face falter, and then I watched his break out into that all-too-familiar grin. He was not going to give up this time. He was going to fight back. I was not prepared for this, for how stupid he was, even though I had known it all along.

"Fine," I muttered, frustration playing upon my face before I looked away from him. I tightened my grip on my bag and all but stomped off. His smile remained, but he didn't laugh, which was good, because I probably would've hauled my bag at his pretty little blond head.

/

I was working on my computer when Naruto came back that night, Sakura in tow. She had her arm threaded through his, and I felt my neck muscles spasm as I inwardly berated myself for using the living room as my personal work space.

Neither of them noticed me at first. I could tell because Naruto's expression was one of undisturbed calm. Only around me did his smile seem to require a great deal of strength. Or did it seem that much easier?

I couldn't help but watch Naruto standing in the doorway. Truth-be-told, I could've helped it, but I also couldn't. It's just that he was standing there so nonchalantly, one hand slung lazily in his pocket and the other occasionally waving through the air as he talked. He had that lazy grin on his face. He had that lazy, goddamn, _I'm-seducing-you-right-now_ grin on his face so that I really was moments away from chucking my belongings at him, threat of assault charges or not. But as usual, I sat there and watched as Sakura fiddled around with her hair and the moment expanded into one of those awkward moments—those moments that suspend and draw out, like a slack string suddenly drawn taut. Those moments right before a kiss.

I thought about clearing my throat, pretending to drop my books, doing anything to pull them out of that moment, but another part of me wondered if I didn't owe them this. If they deserved it. If I deserved it.

I'm disappearing, I thought.

Right as I had resigned myself to suffering through the moment, Naruto turned over and looked at me as if I had called him. In fact, his face was so quizzical that I wondered if I hadn't said something after all.

"Hey," he said, something like a question in his eyes and corresponding smile. Sakura was visibly less pleased, her emerald eyes boring into me with first confusion, and then irritation—the last of which she failed miserably at concealing. I deserved that, too.

I'm sure my own irritation was bared for all as I closed my laptop and began packing my things. "I was just leaving."

"No, no, no," he said quickly, holding up a finger and hopping from one foot to another. "Hold on for a moment, or—I…have something to ask you." He stilled and ran a hand through his hair. "Could you just wait there for a sec?"

I stared at him for a moment before sighing audibly. "Whatever."

Sakura gave me a look which I neglected to respond to. I just sat on the couch and pretended like I couldn't see Naruto give her a hug and light peck on the cheek. She gave him a small smile before frowning at me and taking her leave.

Closing the door, Naruto looked at me and smiled sheepishly. "Sorry about that. I didn't realize you were here."

"Would it have made a difference?" I asked, voice level.

I watched his face screw up before his lips settled into a thin line. I could see that he wanted to say something but stopped himself.

"You wanted to ask me something?" I finally said, standing and pulled my bag across my shoulders.

He rubbed his temples before returning his hands to his pockets. "Yeah. I was wondering what you wanted for dinner tomorrow."

"Dinner," I repeated flatly. "You're going to cook."

"I'm going to try."

"You can't cook."

"I'm going to try," he said again.

I felt a familiar reaction rising up in me, an involuntary response that only _he _could bring about, and for a moment, it was like he was here, smiling at me with those sparkling blue eyes. For a moment, it was like that. And then the moment was gone, replaced only with a bleak coldness as I walked to the door.

"I'm going," I said.

Naruto's hand rested on the frame, preventing me from leaving. He looked troubled, and I'll be damned if he didn't still make frustration look good. "Why?"

I was acutely aware of his presence then, his arm lightly tanned, the gooseflesh that prickled along it and my own that responded in turn. That soft jaw which I had kissed; the strong body which I knew.

"I have to go," I said, more urgently this time. He bit his lip and his brows came together and he stared at me for a few, drawn-out seconds before pulling his hand to his side, surrendering. I walked through and he didn't stop me. He did lean out into the hall and watch until I was out of sight. I know this because, like it or not, there are times even now when I can perfectly picture what it is that he's doing.

/

Dinner was a bad idea. I decided that right away, almost as soon as I had left the apartment the night before. What did he want? Why couldn't he just leave me alone? Why couldn't he just leave things be? I suppose that would've been too much like right.

Instead of being gracious enough to drag on slowly, my classes flew by, and soon I was taking each step, one at a time, until I was pushing the door to the Fredrick's Historical Building open and emerging into the dull world.

And he was there.

I could hardly believe it at first, but he was there, Naruto, at the bottom of the steps smiling up at me from under a blue umbrella. Rain softly pelted the ground around him so that he seemed like an anomaly standing there, protected. When I stopped, letting the door silently shut behind me, the action seemed to be strangely against my will. But he was like a magnet. Wherever he was, I wanted to be there, too.

"Why are you here?" I said finally, tone suspicious.

He laughed as if he had figured me out. The sound brushed against something raw inside of me. "It's raining. I noticed you hadn't taken your umbrella, so I figured I'd come and pick you up." In four brisk steps, he was standing beside me, more awkward than confident with the proximity.

"Pick me up," I repeated. His awkwardness seemed to spill into me as I shifted my feet and glanced at the ground. "Fine. Whatever, I guess."

"Whatever, whatever," Naruto mimicked cheerily. "It's always whatever with you."

"So?" I replied defensively.

"So, nothing," Naruto shrugged. "Far be it from me to change you. Now let's get going." In another awkward moment, he huddled close to me, extending an arm to pull me under the umbrella. I closed my eyes until the moment had passed. "There we go. Now we have to hurry. Dinner is in the oven."

I saw the apartment going up in flames. If anyone could burn it down, it was Naruto. Our sophomore year, he put a burrito in the microwave and set the alarms off when the plastic started melting and smoking. He looked worried as everyone was forced to exit the dormitory and the fire squad went in, and mortified as they came back out with the liquefied remnants of the snack. Though no damage was done, Naruto still looked terribly anxious as the students filed in. It wasn't until I told him that people had better things to worry about than flaming burritos that he finally calmed down, patting me on the head and telling me thanks for trying to cheer him up. I scowled and said I had done no such thing. He laughed and said thanks anyway.

"What are you thinking about?" Naruto asked gently, voice extracting me from my thoughts. He was peering down at me with a strange expression—one I could not read.

"What?"

"Just now. You almost looked like you were going to smile."

"Nothing," I said brusquely, starting down the steps so that he had no choice but to catch up with me.

The walk back was almost entirely silent. Naruto occasionally pointed out trivial things, such as a little girl playing with her dog and a cemetery a ways off in a patch of woods, but my unremitting indifference soon shut him up. Without Sakura, our living buffer, things were certainly shaping up to be awkward at best. We seemed to crash into one another with full force, and such contact was bound to leave one of us worse for wear. I think that particular evening helped me realize just how responsible her presence was for ensuring that Naruto and I remained respectfully on our sides of the ring. Now that protection was gone.

The apartment was cold when we got back, but I pulled off my jacket and my wet shoes nonetheless. To my annoyance, Naruto pulled a blanket from the couch around my shoulders before disappearing into the kitchen.

I couldn't read his face, couldn't find out exactly what he was thinking as I tentatively took a seat at the kitchen table. His face was apt to do this flickering thing around me, expressions shifting from one to next like television channels, and I certainly wasn't going to ask what was on his mind.

"Well," he began, pulling a pan from the oven and laying it on a colorful potholder before me. "Looks like I'm ordering pizza. But you knew that." I glanced from the blackened pan of mush to Naruto before sitting back in my seat. He still couldn't cook. A part of me wished that this Naruto could. That same part threatened to start twisting up now.

"Okay then," he said, falling into his chair and tossing his oven mitt blindly behind him. He drummed his fingers on the tabletop as I watched him fight back a pout. "That took an hour for preparation time. Never mind that I had to go and get the stuff. You could've warned me."

"I told you you couldn't cook."

"Yeah," he sighed, chewing on his fingernail. "Yeah. I guess I just wanted to prove you wrong." He gave me another undecipherable look. "But you were right, because you know me. You know a whole lot about me."

"I don't—"

"You do. I'm not stupid." He looked hurt. My fingers curled into the material of my pants. "I've asked. You don't know how many people I've asked, and they've all told me to ask you. They say you know everything."

"I don't," I said again, quietly.

Naruto stared at me for a minute or so, his brows coming together until they nearly met, until he released a weary breath and seemed to wilt into his chair. "I'm sorry. I didn't mean to badger you. It's just…sometimes I feel like…" Our eyes met and he sat up straighter. "Do you hate me?"

My stomach churned. He most certainly was not stupid. It took a moment to ensure that my voice would be level. It took another to perfect the apathetic tenor. "Why do you ask?"

"Are you serious?" A hint of the smile returned. "You've tailored your schedule so that you avoid me. And don't try and deny it."

"Then I won't," I answered simply.

Naruto chuckled a little to himself. "You're really something, Gaara." I felt myself glare, as if automatically. "You're the only person who takes such a consistent, defensive position with me." I watched as the smile faded as fast as it had manifested. "You must hate me then."

We sat silently for a few more minutes—him staring at the table and me considering if there was any detriment to letting him believe that, whether there really was, truthfully, any truth in it. I attempted to disappear into the floor using only my thoughts. I failed.

"No," I said, that single word filling the room as our eyes met again. "I don't hate you." And I suppose it was true. Hate really was such a very strong word. Certainly too strong to coincide with my feelings for him, however jacked up they currently were.

He gave me that unnerving look again, as if he was trying to piece me together with his eyes, as if by looking at me he could somehow figure me out. He sat back in his chair. "I don't get it," he said quietly. "Out of everything floating around in my head…you are the most vivid. It's your name I hear in my sleep and in my thoughts. It's you I see." He looked down into his lap. "But you're the same person who does anything he can to stay away from me."

"I told you everything."

Naruto's laugh was now bitter, almost unkind. "You mean that day you first came to the hospital? You told me what everyone else told me. That we were friends, that we met our freshman year, that I'm the sweet and funny friend, yadda, yadda, yadda." He took a deep breath, released it, ran a hand through his hair. He looked tired. Tired and sad. "Yes, I'm that person—_was_…am…whatever. But I'm more than that. There has to be more to know than that." He shook his head and his blue eyes pleaded with me. "We were best friends, right?"

Don't do this, I thought. Don't do this, Naruto. I could see all the conversations with him and Sakura going down some metaphorical drain—all those carefully tailored comments that gave away just enough without really giving away anything at all.

Somehow, I brought myself to slowly nod.

"Then you know," he continued. "You know those little things no one else knows. My favorite animal, my favorite movie, my bad habits, my fears. No one else knows these things. And I…I'd like to know. I don't need to know everything. Just _some_ things." Another small span of silence felt like an hour. "They say I won't remember my old life, but if I could remember your name…then maybe I could remember other things. Even if they're little things, anything helps."

I found myself shaking my head and Naruto sat up in his chair again. "Please, Gaara. I'm tired of everyone looking at me like I'm a ghost or something. Please."

I looked at him, looked away. Felt that terrible shifting inside me, that horrid curling of my insides. And still I was able to maintain a blank face.

But it would not last. I would have to leave, and soon, or else I was going to come undone. For all those times when I wondered whether I was doing the right thing, this moment proved exactly why it was that I had so diligently avoided him. It was because of this—this painful rupture that was sure to follow if I remained too long by his side.

"We could even start with something easy," Naruto eventually said, attempting to smile and lighten the mood. "My favorite color?"

I shook my head again and my body moved slowly, as if in water. Closing my eyes, I attempted to focus on my breathing, hoping that the concentration would in turn slow my rapid heartbeat.

"_You can remember for me."_

When that blasted bicycle flashed in my mind, I abruptly stood from the table. Naruto, immediately concerned, stood with me. The damage, as they say, had been done. "What is it?" he asked.

I ignored him and started toward the door. When he gripped me by the arm, I pelted him with a dark glare and attempted to shake free, but he merely tightened his hold. He was always grabbing me, always touching me, always looking at me like that. I hated it. But still, no, I didn't.

"Let me go," I said through clenched teeth. I watched his face flash from regret to misery to anger.

"No. We have to talk and you know it."

"Let me go," I said more sternly, jerking my arm back. He responded by grasping my other arm, and I could feel a strange sort of claustrophobia awakening within me. I could hear a voice which whispered, _This is why you should've stayed away from him_, and it took me a moment to figure out that it was his voice.

"Gaara, if we don't talk now, we never will. And you know that. Now tell me what's wrong," he said gently.

I raised my hands to push him away and he pushed me against the wall. Despite my best efforts, he was not going to let go. The struggle heightened, and I pushed against him with all my might, but he still held me fast.

"My god," he said in slight shock. "You're really going to fight me." I pushed against him again, and he pulled me forward, so that I collapsed, crumpled really, into his arms. I continued to struggle, but he circled his arms around me and pinned me in place with an awkward hug. His heartbeat drummed against my collarbone; his breath disturbed my hair. I felt something inside me crack—start to fall away.

"Let me go," I said once more.

"No," Naruto said. His voice seemed to vibrate against my skull.

"Why."

"Because…you really don't hate me, do you?" I closed my eyes. I could hear his heartbeat that much more. "You just miss me."

Don't do this, Naruto, I thought.

"You're wrong," I said.

"Am I?" I could feel his arms shift so that one curled around my lower back and the other pulled my head under his chin. If I could just pretend—but I couldn't. He really wasn't coming back. "It took me a long time to figure out that you need to do this. I've spent more time with psychiatrists and psychologists than I care to admit, so I think I've learned a thing or two about managing grief. I guess I just hadn't really thought about how much you'd be in pain. That's why you stopped coming to the hospital. That's why you stay away from me. You loved me. I was your friend, and you loved me. So, I'm going to hold onto you—until you willfully calm down or run out of energy. Either way."

We stood there for a long while—ten minutes or so. I would close my eyes and focus on the darkness. I'd open them and lose myself in the soft blue plaid of his shirt. My fingers would curl in that same shirt. His words kept reverberating in my mind. He never once loosened his hold, which was good, because it felt like he was the only thing keeping me together.

"It's all right to cry, you know," he said. And then something really did fall away. Whatever remained inside of me, winding and weaving about, seemed to surge upward. I tried to swallow it down, but I couldn't. Before I knew it, I was crying. I tried to calm myself, but I couldn't. He really wasn't coming back. The force of the revelation shook me, and I felt the urge to curl up, but still Naruto held me. "Hey," he said softly. "It's okay. Just let it out. It's okay."

After a while, he pulled me back to inspect my face, looking terribly guilty as he smiled and tried to wipe away some of my tears. I just couldn't stop crying. The tears kept pooling in my eyes and trailing down my face. I was just so tired, tired of avoiding him, and tired of fooling myself. Finally, he put his arm around my shoulders and led me to our shared bedroom. It was the first time I had been in it with him in I don't know how long. I didn't have any more energy to fight him tonight. The bastard had made sure of that. Grabbing a tissue from his desk, he started to dab my face, but I grabbed it from him and did it myself. I watched mutely as he pulled back the sheets on my bed, humming a little to himself—some made-up tune—before he grabbed the box of tissues and sat it on my desk. I continued to stand there, zombie-like, until he laughed and led me to my bed, which I got in, jeans and all. It was still early—eight or so, but I was so very tired, and so I did not protest when Naruto pulled the blanket up and around my arms, or when he folded a tissue and placed it like a present beside my face, or when he smoothed his hand over my hair.

Only when he said goodnight, pressing a kiss to my forehead and laughing did I tell him to get the hell out. He took my anger as evidence of my mood's improvement and kissed my cheek. When he saw my deathly glare, he proceeded to hopscotch around my face with his lips.

"Naruto, I swear to god stop," I warned. But he didn't. Only when he nearly kissed my mouth did he pause, draw back, and stare at me. He seemed to both look at me and not at me. I could see his face registering something, or trying to register something, as if that same something clicked monotonously in the back of his thoughts. With a small smile, he adjusted my blankets, said a final goodnight, and left, switching off the overhead light. I placed a hand on my forehead, dropped it. Tossed, turned. Fell asleep.

At some point in the night, I thought I heard Naruto quietly come in and touch my hair. But I could have been dreaming.

/

**A/N:** As of 08/23/10, this story has been editted for grammatical and spelling errors, along with any inconsistencies. There is also a less explicit version of Part 3 available upon request, which I can send directly to you. Let me know what you think so far. And thanks for reading!


	5. Stand by me, Part 2 of 3

"Stand by [me]" – _Part II_

It had to be around eleven when I woke up, which meant that not only had I failed to leave the apartment before Naruto awoke, but I had also missed a guest lecture and surpassed some acceptable sleep hour quota.

Oh well.

Literally, that's how I felt as I dragged myself out of bed and squinted into the near-noon light. After sleeping in them, I couldn't bear to wear my jeans any longer, and so I pulled them off and threw on a pair of grey sweats. A quick glance in the bathroom mirror merely conveyed my suspicions that I looked hilarious, and by hilarious I mean horrible. My hair was sticking out every which way (though when wasn't it) and my eyes were puffy and dark even without my makeup (though when weren't they). Oh well.

I trudged into the kitchen scratching my chest through my t-shirt, and of course Naruto was still here, and of course he seemed to anticipate my arrival, smiling at me from where he stood by the oven.

"He lives," he said.

I gave him a failed look that should have been irritation and took a seat at the kitchen table. He put his back to the sink, resting his arms on the counter and facing me. He looked concerned. Was I okay? Yes. Was I sure? Yes. Did I say anything other than yes? Glare.

"Okay, okay," he put up a pancake turner in mock defense. Turning back to the stove, he proceeded to push something around in a skillet. Great gods, was he cooking _again_? "You're gonna love this," he chimed after a bit. "Granted, it doesn't really look like the picture, but I did everything the recipe said. So…" He took the skillet by the handle and pulled it around so that I could stare at the browning, gelatinous mass in the pan. "French toast."

I expected to feel that throbbing pain inside me with the remembrance that he had made this before. But I didn't. There was no twisting, no grating fist in my stomach. Nothing. It was weird to realize it was gone, that I should've felt it already, much earlier, when I had first entered the kitchen and seen him there as I had seen him so many times before on so many other Wednesday mornings.

But something in my face must've suggested otherwise, as Naruto frowned slightly, looked at the skillet, looked at me, said, "No good, huh," and dumped it in the trash. "Well," he sat down across from me, "we could go out for lunch?"

"Orange," I said, after a time.

"Orange? You want one?"

"Your favorite color," I said quietly, resting my cheek in my open hand. "It was orange."

I played with a splinter of wood on the underside of the table as he seemed to similarly play with that idea. I could almost see him taking it, weighing it in his arms to see whether or not it felt familiar, whether or not it felt right. "I don't remember," he eventually said.

"Who said you have to remember?" Naruto looked at me for the first time as if he were a child and I the adult. "Sometimes it's enough to know."

Naruto considered this, rapping his knuckles lightly against his lips, and again it seemed like something really was clicking there deep in his thoughts, but for the life of him, he couldn't figure out what it meant or even what it was. "Okay," he said. "Okay, yeah, you're right, Gaara." I watched him smile and instantly regretted my words. "Thanks."

"Don't thank me," I said with a glare, and felt it happening again, that rise, the fall, the challenge, the accepting of that challenge, the "Why?," the "Because I didn't do anything," the "You tried to cheer me up." The glare. The laugh.

The "No, I didn't." The "Yes, you did."

/

There has to be something in everyone that does not change, that stays the same, some constant as in a mathematical problem that is the answer, that is always there despite endless rebirths, despite cloning, despite even the mind's inclination to forget.

Naruto was like that. Sometimes he would talk to me and I really would feel like he had never left, like maybe those three years and some odd months really hadn't happened, though I knew they had. Some things simply didn't seem to have changed. That smile, that laugh. How quickly he warmed to me, how quickly I started to see a line somewhere blurring. And maybe some days it was me blurring it, and maybe other days it was him, but I certainly started to question this "friendship" that had sprouted, once again, between us. And by "friendship," I mean me sitting there, perturbed, and him standing there, smiling and laughing—the constant back and forth, the persistent no and yes, the push and the pushing back, the going away but always, always coming back.

I started wondering when it had originally began, and I would think—that night he gave me that hickey—and then I would think, no, the day he suggested we sleep together. And then I'd still think, no, it was on that very first day, wasn't it, when he opened the door with that welcoming smile, eager and willing to welcome me into his life, to make room, to push whatever was already there aside so that I would have my own place. And then I would think, is it beginning again? And I would say no, no it isn't, spitefully aware of the fact that it had already begun.

Occasionally he would give me a look, and I would think, he knows, he's remembered something—something about us. I might be doing homework in the living room, or washing dishes in the kitchen, and suddenly I would feel it, that look, and I would turn to him and he would be very nearly glaring at me. At first, it had taken me aback, because Naruto had never looked at me like that before, and there he was, giving me the look which I reserved for use on him. It was strange to receive it at first, but after a while, I got used to it. Besides, I simply had to look at him and that look would disappear, falling off of his face like melted butter. Not once did I ask him what brought about such an expression. Some reasonable (or maybe unreasonable) part of me said to just leave it alone.

But when he wasn't glaring at me curiously, and when that line between us didn't start to bleed, we got along. Which was most of the time. It's not like I experienced a complete 180-degree flip following my mini-breakdown or anything. I just stopped fighting so mercilessly against him. That's not to say I didn't fight however. Because we did fight. Great gods, did we fight. And over the stupidest things, too.

"The clocks are going _forward_ an hour," he insisted one evening.

"Back," I replied succinctly, glancing from his face back to my book, and trying my best not to glare, not to give in to such a stupid argument. Again.

The words disappeared from in front of my eyes as Naruto pulled the book expertly out of my grasp. Leave it to him to be an expert at pissing people off.

"I'm telling you," he said. "I think I know a thing or two about Daylight Savings Time, and we're setting the clocks forward."

"Give me my book back."

"Or what?"

"Give me my book back," I said again, sounding out each word slowly and with anger.

"All talk." And then he would suddenly laugh, making the tension in the room break apart into the air. "We're losing an hour, I'm telling you, Gaara."

"It's the first Sunday in November," I managed to say, voice monotone but still conveying my irritation. "We're gaining an hour."

He seemed to finally hear what I was saying and realize that I might be right. Chewing on his lip, he gave me back my book, disappearing down the hall and to our room—no doubt to refer to the omniscient powers of the internet. I proceeded to read and it wasn't long before I heard him creep up beside me, mouse-like, before kneeling by the sofa I occupied. I ignored him.

"Hey," he said, poking me in the side and smiling so that I immediately pulled away from him and glowered. "You were right." I turned away and continued to read. Tried to. "Hey," he said again.

"_What_," I all but growled, eyes fixed on my book.

"I was wrong," he said, poking me again. When I twitched away from him, he did it again, and suddenly there was the disintegration of the line, and we must've both seen it because Naruto stopped, as if stopping would allow the line to rebuild itself, and I was forced to stand and go to my room to study. No less than five minutes later, he was poking his head into the doorway and smiling.

But despite the fighting, I could still feel us getting close, closer, and as long as that line between us remained intact, things would be fine. I guess when you get as close to someone as Naruto and I originally had, the grooves are already set for that person to come along and fill again.

I got used to his presence again, to the point that it was weird if he wasn't around. Not that I wanted him around, but I wondered what he had gotten himself into if he wasn't there. Usually, we made the living room, humble as it was, our workspace, and if one of us was there working it meant the other soon would be. Naruto regularly took the couch, and sometimes he was like a statue on it, sprawled out, pencil touching the tip of his nose as he filled out the forms necessary for his registration at the university. I was content to sit cross-legged on the floor, as I could then use the floor and coffee table as my desk. Whenever Sakura came, which was less and less, she would always shake her head at us before tiptoeing around our things. But she seemed happier. I could see within each of her smiles the genuine _thank you_ that resided there. If he ever ran into any problems, he always asked me, and I usually answered as best as I could and without enthusiasm. Was I sure he was ready to start? Yes. Really? _Yes_. But what major should he choose? How should I know? What did I think he was suited for? Glare. Laugh. How about art?

"How about art," he repeated, pensively, tapping his pencil against his nose. "How about art."

He said he would think about it, but when the papers came granting him permission to start classes during the winter term, he was set on a degree in Art Education. And this was how things proceeded for a while. There was the occasional tiff, but I will admit that we got along. That doesn't mean that there weren't still those moments in which I felt myself slipping into a darker mood, because there were, and there were still some questions he would ask that I wouldn't answer, and in fact there were quite a few.

"Am I a virgin?" he asked one night, as I was putting away the dishes that he had dried.

Careful consideration, then: "No."

"Huh," he said. This was the closest my stomach ever came to doing that twisting thing again, but it passed. And that moment passed. I thought it was over.

It had to have been two weeks later when he looked up from his breakfast, pinning me with a brooding stare.

"Who'd I lose my virginity to?" he finally inquired, laying his fork down on his plate. I glanced from his plate to his face back to my own food. If he only knew.

"Do you really think I know that?" I said, violently pushing my food around.

"Yeah," he said. I looked up at him and there was that glare. And then there was that smile. "Oh well," he shrugged. "Guess it's not important." Picking up his fork, he continued to eat.

He really puzzled me during these times, although I did not let it show. I wondered if somehow he knew the answers to such questions and just wanted to see what I would say, or if he truly didn't know. And to make matters even more complicated, he asked me one day why I didn't have a girlfriend.

"I'm gay," I said, annoyance clearly visible on my face. At that point, I didn't understand how he could not have known.

"Really?" He seemed to let this "new" information brew. "Well that explains a lot." My expression must've been severe because his eyes widened and he put up his hands. "No, I meant that explains why you never bring any girls around."

I waited for it then, for that line to cement itself in place. I waited for the face that said, _Well, I'll have to be careful around _you_ then. _But it never came. Instead, he said, smiling, "Feel free to bring any guys around. They're always welcome."

I could only sigh and return to my work. But I would soon be returning to my thoughts, and I would think, Why is this happening again?, but I would know it wasn't so much happening again as it was that constant figuring into all of those new equations and naturally producing similar results. He made me hate math. I was a history buff. I liked concrete evidence, events I could actually refer to as a credible reference, a tangible resource. Instead I got nothing but symbols from him, signs that simply stood in for other things, and more often than not these other things weren't the answer at all but merely other signs for use in a series of other, endless, and entirely infuriating equations.

/

Sometimes I try and decide how in the world it could have begun again, and when, and if I had to guess a particular moment—and by that I mean the moment when I myself realized that it had already been long in the making—then I would have to pick the night of the get-together. "Get-together" might've be too mild of a word, but "party" was certainly too strong. We were packing up our things after a Thursday night of studying when he brought it up.

"Want to go to a gathering tomorrow?" he asked, perching on the arm of the couch.

"A gathering," I repeated, my tone enough to convey my abrupt misgivings.

"Yeah," he laughed. "A gathering. Well, it's like a little get-together thingy that a whole bunch of our friends are putting together." I wondered what "our friends" meant, considering I hadn't hung around with anyone in the usual gang for quite some time.

"I've got a lot of work to do," I said, watching as Naruto let out an exasperated sigh and stood.

"You're always working," he whined. "One day, I'm going to look up, and you'll have disappeared into a book or something.

"Not all of us have time to play around."

"Ouch. Okay, well, what do I have to do to get you to go?" I saw the mischievous glance in his eyes. "I could tickle you."

"Touch me and die."

Instead of producing the desired effect of making him back off, Naruto started cracking up. As angry as he could make me, it was still good to hear him laugh like that every once in a while. When he finally calmed down, he came and stood in front of me, near-tears glistening in his eyes from his laughter.

"Gaara, please go," he said. "Everyone says we used to do everything together."

A childish reflex nearly had me saying "We did not." Instead, I said, "That doesn't mean we have to do everything together." Still childish. Oh well.

He reflected on this. "True." And then he placed his hands on my shoulders. "But I _want_ you to go with me."

I felt a three-part reaction to his words. One was exasperation at his unyielding persistence; he never knew when to quit. Another was trepidation, because I couldn't help but wonder why he was always so persistent. And still the third was a warped form of happiness, because it felt good to be wanted, even if it was for such a trivial matter.

"Whatever," I replied, shrugging off his hands. He replaced them and gave me a huge, appreciative grin.

"I could hug you right now."

"Don't—"

Before I could finish my sentence, he embraced me, making me forget what I was going to say and yet prompting the instant recollection of why touching him in any way was dangerous. He smelled nice. He _felt_ nice. But behind all of that sickeningly sweet niceness, I could hear a cautionary _No_. I could feel my hands itching to raise up and pound against his back, and at the same time those same hands could just as easily pull him closer with an insistent _Yes_.

"Thanks, Gaara," he said.

"You're overreacting."

"No, I mean thanks for everything."

"I haven't done anything."

I hadn't felt his laugh so thoroughly within myself since I had awoken with him sprawled naked on top of me. I felt it now, and, like then, it felt like a motor going off inside of him. "Some people might say you're humble. But I know better. You're a stubborn brat."

Pulling away from him with the usual glare, I grabbed my bag and went to my room. Naruto kept walking by and glancing in our room as I got ready for bed, and it took me a while to figure out what on earth he was up to until I pulled back my sheets. There, sitting quaintly on my pillow, was an index card with a goofy smiley face that read: "Thanks for saying yes," and when I looked up, there he was again, leaning in my doorway, head tilted a little, and that charismatic smile on his face. The fondness in it scared me a little. I wondered if he knew it was there. I also hated the fact that he either knew I would say yes or was so cocky that he felt he would be able to make me say yes.

Keeping my gaze level with him, I crumpled the paper in my hand and tossed it in the trash bin. To my displeasure, Naruto laughed again, but it wasn't one of those ha-ha-funny laughs. It was a little bit like a father after his child has done something so inexplicably cute that the only way he can express his love is through laughter. It disarmed me.

"What's so funny," I asked.

"Nothing," Naruto said. "Good night, Gaara. Be sure to dress warmly tomorrow. And bring your umbrella. It might rain."

Giving him another suspicious glance, I got into bed, pulling the covers up and closing my eyes. Soon after, Naruto flipped off the light and closed the door. I wondered where he went on such nights, because every once in a while, he wouldn't go directly to bed. He would dawdle. But deep down I think I knew. I could see him trudging into the kitchen, turning off the light. Traipsing into the living room, turning off that light. But he wouldn't go back to bed. Not yet. He would take a seat on the couch, lean his face against his hand, and that futile resignation would set in as he sat there in the dark. I had only to walk those few steps, that were really so very many steps, that was really so very far, and I knew I would find him there. I _knew_ this. But I couldn't move. All I could think about was how one day Naruto would be saying goodnight to a girl, and that girl might be Sakura or it might not, and that girl would one day be his wife, and he would be telling her to dress warmly and take an umbrella, and he would have kids, he would definitely have kids, and he would love them, and they could only help but wholeheartedly love him in return. And he would love her. Never would that she be a he, not for him. And I suppose that meant that never would that she be me. Covering my face with my pillow, I tried my best not to scream.

/

I was feeling sufficiently better when I woke up the next morning. That is, until I realized he was up. I had originally thought him to be gone as I pulled on a pair of jeans, a long-sleeved t-shirt, and my hi-tops, but just as soon as I had dressed, he was walking through the door and looking for something, and suddenly he was looking at me and shaking his head.

"You're wearing that?" he asked, skeptical.

"Yeah," I replied, defensive. And then I watched as he went to the closet mumbling the whole time about how I never listened. Funny, because everything he said could be applied to himself: I tell him once, but no. Does he have ears? Yes, but he still ignores me.

He pulled out a black turtleneck and extended it toward me. I remembered that he had complimented me on it once before. I shook my head, no. He searched my face for a short time before putting it back and pulling out one of his alpine hoodies. It was jade-green with brown and black fur lining. I eyed him apprehensively as he held out both the jacket and his open hand.

"Come on," he said, closing and opening his hand and nodding apparently toward the thin sweater I had pulled over my t-shirt. "Give me that. This will keep you warmer." I stood there and considered making a run for it. Yeah, I thought. Right. When he aimed to approach me, I pulled off the pullover and handed it to him, grabbing the hooded sweatshirt and roughly pulling it on, signaling with actions alone that I was displeased. I was there with him when he had bought it. "Does it make me look fat?" he had asked and then laughed.

"That will keep you warmer than _that_ will," he said, nodding toward the closet. After another moment of consideration, he pulled a scarf from his desk and wound it around my neck. "There you go. How do you feel?"

"Annoyed."

He grinned. "Then I must've done something right." We walked together (myself unwillingly) into the living room. "Do you have everything?" he asked.

"Yes," I replied stoically.

"Are you sure?"

"_Yes_."

"You look nice." I nearly rolled my eyes. "No, really. You should wear that to the party tonight."

"I thought you said it was a get-together."

"Get-together, party, whatever," he said, appropriating my usual response. "Why get caught up in the semantics?"

If only it was that easy. I wanted to tell him that not everyone was like him, glossing over everything like it didn't matter, swimming throughout the ocean of Life without ever "getting caught up" in anything, while the rest of us were doomed to drown.

"See you later," he said amicably, opening the door and leaning against the wall. His hand must've landed on the light switch, because I watched as he pulled that hand back and stared at it, and then he was very slowly turning to face me again, and there was that confounding glare. I literally watched as it formed, his expression shifting into a near-pained look that really only could've been called a glare. It was still on his face when he shut the door practically in mine.

I sat through my seminars thinking, He must hate me then, because that was the only logical explanation for his erratic change in moods. Either that, or he was beginning to hate me. I never missed the bitter note in his voice when he talked about the person people said he should be, who he used to be, and I wouldn't be surprised if he thought, Well, this was all very fine and good once, but it's certainly not now. To wake up and have people tell you who you are—to be placed into an already existing mold with little freedom of choice—well, who wouldn't begin to hate those responsible?

And the entire day, it was like he was right beside me, or behind me, because I could smell him on the clothes I was wearing, _his_ clothes, so that it seemed like he was with me wherever I went. When I realized it was raining, I could only chide myself for not heeding Naruto's words. Until I found him waiting for me at the bottom of the Frederick's Building, blond hair, blue eyes, and bright smile making him seem like some kind of beacon. Or warning sign.

"Forget something?" he asked.

"I have a hood," I said.

"He has a hood," he repeated with a grin, jogging up the steps, ruffling my hair, and walking back down them with me shielded beneath the bright blue dome. Naruto's coat and scarf were successful in combating the chill in the air, a fact which disheartened rather than pleased me. "The plan is to drop by the apartment, drop off your things, and head straight to Ino's place." A vision of the devious platinum-blonde danced in my head. "Sound good?"

"Whatever."

Naruto laughed at my lack of enthusiasm, but I knew exactly what to expect. And I was right. The moment we stepped foot into Ino's apartment, the chirping began.

"Naruto! It's so great to see you, Naruto!" and "Hey, Naruto! We missed you!" and "Oh my god, is that Gaara? It's been so long!"

"Wait, Gaara's here? No way, oh, he is!"

"You disappeared off the face of the earth, Gaara. Welcome back!"

"It's so great to see them together."

"It is."

"They were always together."

"They were."

Kiba nearly dragged us both to the ground when he jumped between his, throwing his arms around our necks and hanging on us like a crazed monkey. "The dynamic duo returns!" he exclaimed, allowing me in record time to realize he was tipsy. "Seriously, Gaara, we missed you, man." I heard Naruto laugh and nearly kicked him. "But really, it was like you were here in a way. This one—," he gestured toward the blond, "—talks nonstop about you."

"I do not," Naruto curtly replied.

"You do too," Sakura said with a smirk, extending an arm for a half-hug. "Naruto," she greeted him as he returned the embrace. She turned to me. "And Gaara," she said warmly, knowing better than to attempt such a gesture with me.

"Onward men!" Kiba declared. "For tonight we feast!"

We all four of us—Kiba, Sakura, Naruto, and me—headed to the kitchen where the table was covered with an array of light and dark beer, white and red wine, and cheese and crackers. To my chagrin, Naruto grabbed a small plate, plunked a few cheese cubes and crackers on it, and handed it to me as if I was incapable of getting my own food.

Kiba shook his head at us, watching as I shot Naruto a vexed look that he met with cheerful smirk. "You two sicken me," he said.

"Don't they?" Sakura added. I watched as she poured a glass of pink champagne, and she really was beautifully cold standing there, hair up in a green barrette which perfectly matched her long-sleeved green dress and pumps. Though maybe I was the only one who could feel the third degree radiating from her. "I'm told you decided on Art Education?" she turned back toward Naruto. "Red or white?"

"White," Naruto answered. "And yes, I did. Gaara helped me decide."

It was times like these when a second Sakura seemed come to life—the evil Sakura. She could be sweet and polite one moment, but the very second she heard something she disliked, there was that frosty gaze. At that moment, it was directed at me.

"I only suggested it," I said, somewhat in my defense.

Handing the glass of wine to Naruto, she placed a hand on his arm and glanced at me again. "Don't take this the wrong way, Gaara," she turned back to him, "but I hope you picked it for you."

I watched as Naruto's gaze shifted to an extremely grown-up one. "Who else would I have picked it for?"

For a moment, no one said anything.

"You're doing your residency, right?" Shikamaru asked, appearing, seemingly, out of the air. He had his usual disinterested glance on his face and his hands hung limply out of his pockets.

"Yeah," Sakura replied, a little caught off guard.

"Cool," he said, grabbing a beer. I don't think there was anyone in the kitchen who didn't feel the mood lighten.

"What about you, Kiba?" Sakura asked, whatever disposition she had been in dispelled as she smiled. "Aren't you doing residency, too?"

"Yeah," he grinned magnificently. "But I'm gonna have it tougher than you. It's harder to be a veterinarian than it is to be a people-doctor. Like I always say, though: Bring it on." He looked at me. "Whoa, you're gonna be a doctor too, right? Aren't you starting your doctorate next year?"

I nodded and then leered as Naruto patted my head.

"He doesn't play around," he said. "It's always wake up, read, go to class, read some more, come back home, and read. Then he goes to sleep and the whole cycle begins again." I gave him another look but he just smiled at me. "He'll make a fine historian one day."

"I could drink to that," Kiba said resolutely.

"Me too," Naruto agreed, raising his glass as Sakura followed suit. A few other people raised their glasses and someone poured me a glass of red wine and handed it to me as Naruto stated cordially: "To Gaara—future famous historian." He added, sheepishly, and with a small shrug: "And the best friend I could've ever hoped for."

"Hear, hear!" Kiba shouted, and everyone downed their glasses, including me, because, even though I was not the fondest of alcohol, I needed something in my system that would lessen his brilliant smile. Drinking always gave me headaches, but I figured one drink would be relatively harmless and a small price to pay to get that ringing laugh out of my ears.

I went to sit my glass down, and Kiba offered to refill it. I was about to refuse him when Naruto asked if he could get me a glass of water instead, and I felt angry for some reason. No, I knew what that reason was. It was as if he was saying, "Better watch yourself, Gaara," and I certainly did not need to be watched, let alone by him. Ignoring Naruto, I told Kiba yes. I was feeling fine anyway as our group gravitated into the living room.

As much as I would never admit it, the get-together was pleasant. I got the opportunity to learn what everyone was doing these days. But it was also a little sad, because we were all growing up. Kiba was engaged; Hinata had recently graduated early; Ino was an established artist. I wanted to think that time flies, but that wasn't right. Time didn't go anywhere; it was people who moved.

A shocked gasp filled the room as Ino came bounding toward our group, heels clicking. "Naruto, and—Gaara!" She gave us each a hug. "It's been ages! I haven't seen you two together since—well, it must've been since that party." I felt my grip tighten on my glass and took a sip. I might be needing it. That, and more.

"You know the one," she continued with a smile, "Kiba's party? God, _that_ was embarrassing. But I'm a changed woman. I know, how crazy is that? You know, I swear," she laughed, "weren't you two about to kiss? Or did you kiss? Oh, but anyway, I was drunk so I was most definitely seeing things. Though, no more drinks for me. I'm pregnant."

And while a whole new conversation developed around Ino's expectancy, I unfortunately looked up and saw his face, Naruto's, as he stood there lost in his thoughts, and I knew exactly what it was that he was thinking about. He had this peculiar look on his face—part-troubled, part-undecipherable—and then he looked at me. What was he going to say? What was I going to tell him? But maybe I could get away with it. But no—his expression proved that I was not going to get away with it this time.

I was never so glad to see Sakura gently take his arm, telling him she needed to speak with him in private. He glanced at me again before acquiescing.

Well, I thought. This is what I get.

As if to confirm my thoughts, I felt a dull throb start right behind my nose. The beginning of a headache.

/

I took a seat somewhere and at some point—by then a migraine was in full swing and I stopped paying attention to time and place. People asked if I was all right, but I waved them away. "It's just my head."

Someone must've told Naruto, because the next thing I knew, he was kneeling in front of me with a concerned look on his face.

"What's wrong?" he asked, pulling my hands away from my face and holding them, softly, in his.

"Nothing," I muttered. I tried to pull my hands away but his grasp was stronger than I thought. "It's just a headache, that's all."

Peering up into my face with those eyes that could see everything, he must've seen something he didn't like. "Okay," he said. "Time to go."

If my head hadn't felt like it was splitting in two, I would've put up a bigger fight than I did. But I could hardly see, let alone rebuke the one person I trusted to get me back to the apartment. Standing, Naruto pulled me to stand too, and after a quick but polite goodbye—courtesy of him, not me—we were out and into the night air.

"Do you usually get like this when you drink?" he asked, pausing to face me.

"Yes," I replied.

"Then why in the world did you drink?" That was probably the most critical I had ever heard him sound when talking to me.

"You wouldn't understand."

"I wouldn't understand," he repeated. After a moment, he said, "I understand a lot more than you think."

I made to glare at him, but another sharp pain seemed to paralyze me. I brought my right hand up and over my eyes, standing that way for a moment until I felt Naruto's hand slip into my left. I tried to pull it away, but he said, "Nope," and started walking so that I had no choice but to do the same. "You'll just have to deal with it until we get back."

And deal with it I did. Really, that was my only option, because keeping my eyes open for more than a few seconds only seemed to aggravate my migraine. It was unnerving at first, relying solely on him to direct me back to the apartment, but after I realized the extent—the pains he went to to make sure that the path ahead of me was clear, I felt significantly more at ease. It was a little embarrassing too, the way he'd say, "Stop," and so I'd stop, and he'd say, "Be careful, there's a curb, yeah, right there. Okay, we've passed it." Or, "There's some steps coming up," and it would seem like forever until we actually came to those steps, until I heard him say, "Stop. Okay, now take a step up. And another, and another, and a—"

"I get it," I cut him off, and he laughed.

"He gets it," he replied cheerfully, all the while holding my hand. He started to swing his arm, and likewise mine, like a child, but I put a stop to that right there. "You're no fun," he said. And then, "No, you're actually a lot of fun."

I would've thought that his insistent banter would've worsened the throbbing pain in my head, but it didn't, and it almost seemed to lessen it.

"We're here," he eventually said, and I heard him get the key out and unlock the door of the main complex. Gently tugging my hand, he directed me the rest of the way, until we were safely within the actual apartment.

"Lights on or off?" he inquired.

"Off," I said. A sudden churning in my abdomen confirmed what I'd hoped would not come next. "I'm going to be sick."

At this, Naruto pulled me to the bathroom, tossing up the toilet seat before I started to throw up. I didn't really throw up much of anything at all. Most of it was dry heaving, but it still drained me of most of my strength, and, added to my migraine, it was hell. Every once in a while Naruto rubbed my back and offered me water. No, I didn't want anything. I wanted him to leave. Did he do that? No. He sat there. He told me it would be okay. He told me he was still here—that he wasn't leaving, and I thought, Why isn't this awkward? I wanted it to be awkward, because what did that mean if it wasn't awkward? What did that mean about the line? What did that mean about me, about him, about us?

I folded my arms on the toilet lip and rested my head on them. To hell with sanitation. Turn off the bathroom light, I told him. He did. He eventually (force-)fed me two aspirins and some water, which I eventually threw up. What did he think would happen, I mumbled into my arms. He said nothing. At some point, I glanced over, wondering if he was even there. I could just barely make out his silhouette beside me where he sat.

"Feeling better?"

"No." Silence. "What time is it?"

"A little after 12:30."

"Go to bed."

"Nah." Then, silence.

I fell asleep some time after that, and at some point, I could feel myself moving as if in a dream, but the feeling went away. I'm not sure how much later it was, but I drifted into semi-wakefulness again, a feeling of panic setting in as I realized I wasn't in the bathroom anymore. The feeling steadily dispersed as I became conscious of the fact that I was looking at Naruto's bed, which meant I was in mine; ours were parallel. But he wasn't in his, and then I felt his hand land softly on my side.

"I'm here, Gaara," he said. My head still hurt, though not as severely as before. I knew the migraine was on its last leg, because my desk lamp was on and the light didn't bother me.

Naruto's legs bent over the edge of the bed. My head was in his lap. I turned a little and he looked down at me over the pages of the book he was reading. His back was to the wall. He smiled.

"Do you need anything?" he asked.

I minutely shook my head and he placed his hand gingerly on my forehead. It felt good, his hand. Cool. I closed my eyes, felt his hand smooth through my hair, felt his fingers massage my scalp.

I never fell so quickly back into sleep.

/

That Saturday everything changed.

Naruto was still asleep when I woke up, so I quietly crept out of bed, pulled the blankets around him where he lay slumped against the wall, brushed my teeth, pulled on some clothes, grabbed my laptop and left for the library. I could not spend another second in that apartment with him. And by that I mean I wanted nothing more than to spend every second there with him.

That's why I couldn't be there. He made me think crazy, utterly preposterous thoughts, things I had no business thinking, things my siblings would scarcely believe because they were so very far away from who I was…am…whatever. He threw off my equilibrium, and it was the calm with which he did it, with which he did not realize he was doing it, that disturbed me. I used to know who I was. I used to know the types of people I could stand and the ones that I could not. His type fell into the latter group, but now—_now_, god, now _what_?

I was falling for him again, now, wasn't I, I realized as I stared at my blank computer screen through my fingers which covered my face. Wasn't that why I took such a "consistent, defensive position" with him, as he put it? Wasn't I trying to fight against him, and, by extension, myself?

No, I told myself calmly. _No_.

I turned to my homework and essentially buried myself in it. I did nothing for the duration of that Saturday but work on my thesis. Thankfully, there was a small coffee shop within the library, so eventually I moved my things to that area and continued my work there. People came and went, a few said hello. I looked up and saw the hour hand skip from eleven to four to nine, and it got to the point where I couldn't look at my screen too long without my eye starting to twitch. At 10:15, I decided to head back.

I felt a lot calmer as I walked back to the apartment. My previous thoughts were subdued with the realization that he was one of those people who you could never be sure about yourself around, and never mind being sure about them.

The lights were off when I returned; I could tell by the darkened windows as I approached from the sidewalk. He must have gone out with friends or with Sakura, I figured, but as I was about to open the door, I heard his voice resounding inside. It possessed a strange array of inflections, which told me right away that he was upset. When I finally did walk in, he paused mid-sentence and looked at me. "Sakura," he mouthed, covering the receiver of his cell phone and flashing a weak smile. I could hear her voice still carrying throughout the room, as if she were in another room arguing with somebody else.

"Can I call you back?" I heard him say, tiredly, as I walked down the hall to our room. Apparently that engendered a series of other comments, because it was thirty minutes or more later when he finally peeked into the room. I was at my desk and I looked at him, and for the first time in a while, he didn't meet me with a smile.

"How do you feel?" he asked.

"Fine," I said. I reached behind me and grabbed his jacket from the back of my chair. "Here." I paused. "Thanks."

"You're welcome." He looked at my open text book. "Heading to bed soon?"

"Yeah." An apathetic "You?"

"Soon."

I looked at him for a few more seconds before turning my attention back to my book. Behind me, he hung up his jacket and stopped again at the door.

"Want the light off?"

I switched the lamp on my desk on. "Yes."

With a quiet goodnight, he flipped the light switch downward. Even with my lamp, the room had never seemed so dark.

I tried to read, but couldn't. I couldn't focus. I'd be halfway through a sentence and realize that I didn't remember what the one before had said. Time for bed, then. Pulling off my jeans and shirt, I slipped on an old graphic tee that I nearly swam in, so that my cobalt boxers just peeked out from beneath. It was late now, nearly midnight when I opened the bedroom door and walked across to the bathroom. Naruto was still up. I could hear his quiet words, that patient tone traveling gently in to me. Every once in a while, there would be a slight edge, a pitch which bordered on annoyance, but he always controlled it.

By the time I had brushed my teeth, he must've hung up because an eerie silence had settled in the apartment. I paused for a moment and stared down the hall. It darkened to the point that I couldn't make anything out, even though I knew what existed there.

_No_, I thought.

I continued to the bedroom, turning off the desk lamp and propping the door closed before getting into bed.

It was so quiet I could hear the second hand on my wristwatch making its rounds somewhere on my desk. Turning onto my side, I folded my arm and lay my head on it. Even with one ear covered, that blasted ticking still carried through, loud and clear, like a hidden explosive device counting down the seconds to my doom.

"What on earth is that noise?" Naruto had asked me once, startling me because I thought myself to be the only one still awake.

"My watch."

"Well," he chuckled. "Tell it to be quiet."

I lay on my back, glancing momentarily at Naruto's empty bed.

Goddamn him.

Hastily drawing back my covers, I got out of bed and rubbed my temples. The door opened silently as I emerged into the hallway, and my footsteps barely sounded as I walked up the hall and into the living room. It took a moment for my eyes to adjust, not that it would have mattered. He was where I knew he'd be, slumped on the couch, staring forward—not out the window, which might've made sense, which he might've gotten away with, but at the wall. And still, he was not even looking at the wall.

"Go to bed," I said tiredly, a little surprised that my voice did not surprise him. He simply turned to look at me, looking a little confused. I could make out that much by way of some lost, outside light that just barely lit the room.

"Why are you still up?" he asked. "It's late."

"Go to bed," I said again.

Naruto regarded me in silence for a moment before having enough sense to turn toward the window. I was going to have to do it, wasn't I? The game was over, had been long ago. No, it was never a game. It had always been so much more serious than a game.

"What's wrong?" I muttered. It felt so weird to say. It was hard to say. I couldn't help but think that I was a person not meant to say it, as I couldn't make myself sound like I truly meant it. Naruto's shoulders heaved—probably in a small laugh. I thought he was going to ignore me until I saw them heave again in a sigh as he gesticulated beside him on the couch.

"Sit," he said. I did. I sat as far away as possible from him, and still I felt uncomfortable. I never liked that couch after…

After.

"Sakura and I got into a fight," Naruto said. He pinched the bridge of his nose and closed his eyes, looking horribly tired, looking horrible as he sat in that false light. Suddenly he looked over and attempted a smile. It came out unbalanced, like his face was broken. "Argument, fight, whatever." He rubbed his hands together as if trying to warm them, and I wondered why I had even come out here. What did I think would happen?

"She said I'm getting too attached to you," he raised a brow as he bent over and looked at his hands. "Maybe she's right." I looked from him to the wall, and suddenly I could understand its appeal. Stark white nothingness. I'd take that over his troubled faces any day, and I'd certainly take that austere wall over this conversation, but I suppose at this point we both knew it was unavoidable. I think I knew what was coming. I think I knew_ this _was coming.

"You know," he continued slowly. "I had this weird dream not too long ago where you were crying. I don't know where we were or anything, but you were bent over crying. When I woke up, I was crying too. For some reason, I told Sakura about it. I guess I needed to tell somebody about it; it was just so weird. But when I told her, she got mad. She said I worried too much about you and you could take care of yourself. And after the party—" He had started smiling as he spoke, but now he was somber again. He looked at me and didn't hide the glare this time. Funny, I wished he had. I wondered if he felt the stinging recoil that I did now whenever I glared at him.

"What are you thinking?" I said, and it was weird but I felt just a little bit detached, just a little bit removed from the scene. I felt like I didn't care anymore, even though I knew I did.

"I'm thinking…" he turned toward the window, "we have a weird relationship. What Ino said…was it true? God, why am I asking, I know it was true." Rubbing his temples much like I had earlier, he eventually leaned back. "It's like your name; I just knew it. I knew when she said she saw us kiss or whatever that it was true." I could hear it in his voice—a certain tone, like when he had told me that he was aware I was avoiding him. _Don't try and deny it._

We sat in silence for a while, but it was not an awkward silence. It was a necessary silence, because I knew…the worst had yet to be to said, had yet to come. In my periphery, I could see Naruto cross his arms and settle further into the couch, and it seemed like it might swallow him. If only.

"Sometimes," he said, "I feel really weird around you. I'm not gonna lie—it's weird. But it feels worse when you're not around." His laugh, when it came, was bitter. "What am I saying," he said, rubbing his face. "What in the world am I saying?" His hands falling into his lap, he turned slightly, just barely facing me. When he spoke, I couldn't quite figure out what it was that I heard in his voice. Maybe fear; maybe sadness. Like his face, the expression flickered. "Did we—" He couldn't finish.

"Yes," I said. Another span of quiet. I wanted to stand up and tell him to stop, just stop, don't do this, Naruto. Just be quiet, just let it go. Just let it be. But that stuff, that_ stuff_ between us had been settling for so long that the slightest disturbance was sure to toss it all up into the air again. That stuff seemed to be in the air now, between us, all around, and I wasn't sure if it would ever settle again.

"Why didn't you tell me?" he asked, sounding hurt. "Did you think I was stupid? _Do_ you?"

"No…That's why."

Silence.

"Do you like me?" he asked, and though I was not looking at him, I could perfectly picture him—stern-faced, serious, for once in his life so serious that you wouldn't think him capable of such a lighthearted laugh, such a handsome smile. I never did turn and look back at him. I never did answer him. I did shift my attention from the wall to my lap, but that was all. I felt like something was dying inside of me. I felt old. I felt like I wanted to stop talking, like I should've never come out here, like I should've never gotten involved with him, period. "I see," Naruto eventually said, placing his hands on his knees and making it look so much more strenuous than it should have to stand up. "Well, let's just go to bed. We'll discuss this tomorrow, or something. Or something," he said again, as if an afterthought. "It's late. We just need to go to bed." Brushing it off, brushing, brushing, brushing it off. We would never talk about it again. He would decide that. It was over, like us.

He extended a hand which I glanced at but ignored. Standing, I left the living room, trying so very hard to be grateful of the fact that things couldn't have gone any other way, that they couldn't have gone worse. Trying. I could feel it though, that gloom, that horrific melancholy threatening to overtake me. Naruto's footsteps echoed behind me, one and then another, endlessly it seemed, until we were both back in the bedroom. It suddenly felt so much smaller, as if the walls were closing in a little more each second so that one couldn't quite tell it was happening at first and likewise wouldn't understand until he or she was crushed. I stopped at my bed; my fingertips brushed over the coverlet but didn't quite catch. Naruto hovered behind me. Perhaps we both hovered. Perhaps that's all it took. I saw his hands land on either side of me, tighten into fists. Turning to face him, those hands came up and cupped my face, and I understood it, I felt that possession as Naruto looked just slightly down at me, as I was just slightly shorter than him, and his eyes fixed me with that glare, only it was not a glare, no. No, so close I could now tell that it was more pain than anger, that it had always been, that I had always made it anger so I would not have to see the pain. Unlike the night before, his touch was no longer cool. It was nearly searing, hot, as he held my face in his hands. Or maybe it was me, or maybe it was both of us. That pain, god, it could suck you in. With that face and that pain, he made you feel it. He made it so that there was no line.

The moment expanded before us, like the silence, all around us so that it seemed that we must be this close. We must be. I could feel his breath upon my face, my lips. I'm sure he could feel mine. He opened his mouth—made to say something. Didn't. His face seemed to flicker between yes and no. I said nothing, offering nothing, as I stared blankly back at him, and he seemed to want me to make the choice for him. He seemed to ask me with that searching gaze what to do, as if I knew.

Slowly and gently, he brought his forehead to rest on my shoulder and his hands abandoned my face before winding tightly in the front of my shirt.

"We can't," I managed to say, somehow.

His hair brushed softly against my cheek, hinting at the morning shower he had taken. How easy would it be to reach up and put my hand through that hair, to rest that hand on his head. To pull him close, closer. To give in. I waited for his laughter to erupt, for it was the only thing that could combat the crackling tension in the room. It never did. My hands remained faithfully by my side. Naruto pulled away from me and got into his bed. I got into mine. For the first time in a while, though I would realize it later, my thoughts drowned out my watch.

Maybe things would've been different if I had only held him, if I had only brought my hands up and held him. Maybe if I had done that, things would've been different. It scared me, how much I wanted to. But for his sake. For _his_ sake…

Naruto's breathing wouldn't even out into the rhythms of sleep for quite some time. Like me, he was awake, thinking. But he never said anything.

He said nothing. Neither did I.

/

**A/N:** Huh. Well, there were three different ways I considered working out the end of this chapter. Two of them would've probably made you happier than the one I chose, but I decided that those two also wouldn't have made for a very realistic outcome. There's only one part left to this story, and I have a feeling its going to be exceedingly long. Just be prepared. Things will be getting hectic soon, but I will do my very best to complete it in a reasonable amount of time. Updates will be in my profile. And do tell me if you take issue with the story in any way. As always and truly, thanks for reading.


	6. Stand by me, Part 3 of 3

**NOTE:** This final part is exceedingly long at 20-some-thousand words. I would suggest reading maybe half, and then coming back to finish it, (or perhaps even smaller parts) but it's up to you. As previously stated, there is also a less explicit version of this part, which I can email directly to anyone who would like it. It's too large to post anywhere else. Thanks!

* * *

"Stand by [me]" – _Part III _

He avoided me for three days after that. Three days.

During those three days, I studied and went to classes like normal, opting to ignore his empty bed and the fact that he was probably with her. So much for talking about it tomorrow, although I couldn't exactly blame him. It wasn't every day you learned that you had slept with another man. Truth-be-told, I was glad for his absence. Having such things brought up again…and by him…it was too much. I needed some time away from him.

But three days.

He could've tried a little harder.

It was the mid-afternoon of that third day, as I sat writing a paper in the kitchen, when he showed up. I was so thoroughly engrossed in my reading that I didn't hear him come in, let alone become aware of his presence, until he placed a to-go cup of coffee before me, hand poised around the lid until I looked up at him. Again, no smile. I wanted to think I could get used to that.

"It's black," he said.

"That's fine."

He stood there for a few more seconds before pulling the seat out catty-corner to my own and hastily occupying it. Breaking eye contact, he popped the lid off of his own coffee and took a test sip before deciding it was still too hot.

"Okay then," he sighed.

"I'm writing—"

"Yeah, yeah, I know, so I'll try and make this quick." He curled his lips into a quirky expression, all the while staring down at his cup. "Sorry for disappearing without notice."

"It doesn't matter—"

"It does. But anyway, that's not what I wanted to talk about." He turned to face me. "I wanted to talk about…us." I stared at him and then down at my book. No longer than I had looked down, Naruto had pulled my book away, shut it, and sat it on the chair opposite me. My resulting glare was met with veiled blue eyes. I seemed to have taught him well. "Listen, I know you don't want to talk to me," he continued, "but we're not going to do this again. Frankly, I'm getting a little tired of you taking off whenever something comes up that you don't like."

I studied him carefully. He seemed to know what I was thinking, what I was about to say, because he said, "Okay, yes, I left this time, but I figured you needed some time alone…" He traced the lip of his cup, adding quietly, "And so did I." The silence that filled the room this time was thankfully not the stifling silence from three nights before. It was broken by Naruto's short, bemused laugh. "Funny thing is, I'm not any more sure of myself than I was to begin with."

"It's only been three days."

"Yes, yes," he waved his hand through the air. "It's only been three days, but I have a feeling that it wouldn't matter whether it was three days or thirty. We'd probably still be confused."

"Speak for yourself," I stated flatly. He looked at me with that broken smile, amusement barely lighting up his face, but still lighting it just enough.

"Are you trying to tell me you're _not _confused?" he inquired.

"No. I'm trying to tell you to speak for yourself."

"Fair enough." He took a short drink. Whatever amusement had been there was now gone. "For me, though, it's been…confusing, to say the least. Weird as hell, really. Not because we…slept together, but also because yeah, we…did. We did. We slept together," he said again, as if saying it aloud convinced himself that as much as he no doubt did not want to believe it, we had, in fact, slept together. "I just can't believe it. We had…sex. I gave you my virginity."

"_Okay_," I said sternly, nails biting into the paper of my cup.

"Sorry," he said, sucking on his bottom lip. Looking at him, I noticed that he appeared rather tired, as if he hadn't slept very well these past few days. That made two of us. "I just…why didn't you tell me? Things might've been different."

"What difference does it make?" I muttered.

"All the difference…No difference…Bah!" He flicked his now-empty cup, sending it careening off the edge of the table and out of sight. "Why…did we do it?"

"You just wanted to try it."

"To try it?"

"Listen, I'm not psychic. I don't know what was going on in your mind. You said you wanted to try it, so we did it."

Naruto was clearly surprised to hear so many words stringing from my mouth. His own mouth hung open a little before he closed it and sat up straighter. "And you agreed?"

My expression was quickly contorting into a glare. "You wouldn't shut up about it, so yes, I agreed. You don't remember, so I don't expect you to understand."

I let out a quick sigh and sat back, adopting his sluggish position and taking another sip of my gloriously-lukewarm coffee. How did we get here? Naruto wouldn't take his eyes off of me as I sat there, making sure to look away from him.

"Yeah," he said after a time, though I had no idea what he was saying "yeah" to. He sounded distracted, preoccupied. "I don't remember. I can't understand." Reaching under the table, he grabbed his abandoned coffee cup and stood, tossing it into the wastebasket before handing me back my book. Somehow, he had managed to save my place with a quickly-bent page. Leave it to Naruto to still care about saving my page in the middle of such a tenuous conversation. Still, it was little things like this that kept me by his side even now. "You're right, Gaara," he said. I met his gaze, which now seemed a little more at ease, a little more sure, a little less broken. That lazy smile followed soon after. "It was three years ago. Who knows what I was thinking._ I_ certainly don't," he said with a quick shrug. "So we had sex…Okay. Fine. It's over and done with. It's in the past."

I had thought that what I was hearing now would be what I wanted to hear. Until I actually heard it. Instead of relief, I felt cold. I felt a harsh bitterness overtaking me as he brushed everything aside, as if, with a few words, he could neatly push it back into the past, in the realm of over-and-done-with.

"I know how weird this sounds," he continued, "but I don't want it to get between us. Besides, you certainly seem to have gotten over it, so I see no reason why we have to loiter around the topic. Agreed?"

"Agreed," I answered impassively.

"Okay," he rocked on his heels, looking from my face to the ground and back again. "We were close friends." He laughed as he added, "Close friends do stupid things."

"Yes," I said. "They do."

"And don't get me wrong or anything. I don't expect it to be all rainbows and butterflies from now on—" whatever _that_ meant "—but you are my best friend, you know?" I looked at him skeptically. "You're my best friend, so I don't want silly things like this to come between us." Silly. Yeah. "Really, Gaara. You're giving me that look again, but I want you to know that I'm going to try my best. Really, I am. I'm going to try to be…a good friend."

I'm not sure how Naruto took my silence, but eventually he said, "Well, okay," before telling me he was going to go lay down and how Kiba's dog kept him up all night barking and how he really was extremely tired. At one point, I glanced down at my book, and he said, "Your paper. Right. Yeah, let me let you get back to that," with this awkward grin on his face. With a quick wave, he was off, jogging down the hall and disappearing into our room.

An hour or so later, I had to grab another book, and so I quietly slipped into our room, having mastered silent movements during the long, complicated course of our relationship. Naruto's back was to me as I picked the book up from my desk, and even in my silence, he rolled over and immediately awakened (or maybe he had already been awake) as our eyes caught, propping himself up on his elbows.

"Hey Gaara?"

"What?"

"I'm sorry for treating you like you know everything," he said, an expression of regret flashing across his features. "Sometimes…it's easy to forget that I knew more people than just you. I just assume that of course you would know anything there is to know about me, and that's…very inconsiderate."

"It's fine," I said.

"It's fine," he repeated. "Yeah, maybe." Without another word, he turned away from me and back toward the wall.

I wondered what he was thinking. Unlike three nights ago, I found it hard to simply come out and ask him. Why did it take a terrific amount of tension to do things like that?

/

Slowly but surely, things went back to normal. But it certainly took some time, and it was certainly a slow process. Even then, I wasn't sure what "normal" was for us anymore.

Maybe it was the gradual, week-long process of us both moving back into the living room to work, or maybe it was Naruto beginning the new tradition of a hot cup of coffee, which I woke up to every Tuesday and Thursday morning. Or maybe it was simply the steady repair of that smile, which seemed to take several weeks to perfect. The laugh took significantly longer, but its sparkling ring was soon lighting up the apartment.

I did notice two things which could really only be described as problematic. The first was Sakura. She stopped coming over, or maybe she came when I wasn't there, but regardless, her presence seemed to all but disappear. I saw her a few times on campus, and she smiled and waved, but I could see that, much like Naruto, something had broken inside of her—something she was trying to fix. I was not one to ask either of them about it, and so I didn't. Naruto never brought it up either.

The second had to do with us. Our relationship developed an element of physicality and touch that was not there before. Naruto no longer hugged me, but he seemed to come up with excuses for touching me. Always there was some kind of explanation. Whether placing a plate before me or changing clothes or washing dishes, there was his hand on my shoulder or on my arm for support or brushing against my own hand as he gave me a bowl to dry. Sometimes during these moments, I looked at him, but he remained unchanged, making me think I was imagining things. But then again, there would be his hand on my back as he walked around me in our bedroom.

Problematic, yes.

He didn't make it easy for me to bury my feelings for him. At this point, I was done lying to myself, for the most part. I found him attractive, yes—yes, I did, but anything else had died with _him_ or was steadily in the process of dying. Anything else was just me lying to myself.

And if I'd cared to look, I would have noticed that the line had been warped. It was as if it had been thrown against a wall and scrambled, as if the code of which it was composed had been corrupted. What did the hand on my back mean? Friendship? Something else? Did the line even matter anymore when I seemed to be the only one minding it?

And could he really be so oblivious? Sometimes I wasn't so sure.

That glare, that pained expression of his, all but disappeared, except that sometimes it seemed to resurface. I could see it flicker across his face. And then it was gone. We never did talk about _that _again, which I think we were both thankful for. What more was there to say?

For him, it very well may have been in the past. Over and done with. Maybe I had done such a good job of presenting myself as unaffected, unchanged, that Naruto really did think that I didn't care, that I certainly did seem to have gotten over it. I looked in the mirror one morning and stared at my blank expression. How could anyone know what I was thinking, let alone Naruto? Although he used to know. As annoying as it was, he used to just know.

Why did I suddenly feel like I missed his sixth sense?

/

"What am I going to do for winter break?"

I finished washing my face, reaching out blindly for a towel. Naruto placed it in my hand. Our fingers touched. When I had finished toweling the water off, I looked up to face troubled blue eyes.

"What?" I said.

"For winter break," Naruto replied. He was wearing boxers, nothing else. I hadn't yet pulled a shirt on. Of course. "Where am I going to stay, I mean?"

"How should I know?" I said tiredly.

"No, I mean, really." He scratched his arm. "Who would I stay with? I literally have no idea."

I hung up the towel and stared at him in silence for a short moment. He looked genuinely bothered. "Iruka, I guess."

"Oh, yeah. Iruka…"

"Your foster father."

"Yeah, I know. I know." He shuffled in place, successfully blocking my only exit from the bathroom. Some sadistic part of myself took joy in the fact that he wasn't always so blithe, so carefree. Another part just wanted to leave the bathroom as soon as humanly possible. "Just…wouldn't it be weird? I mean, yeah, I talk to him and everything, but it's every couple of weeks. I don't really know him that well. I mean, I know him, yeah, I know him, but…but I don't want to intrude."

I ran a hand through my hair before bringing it to my hip. "Trust me. He won't care."

"But—"

"Iruka loves you. He won't care." Naruto was still giving me a helpless look.

"But winter break is a month long. I can't…I mean…"

"You've done it before, Naruto. It's what you've always done."

"Not always," he added, dejectedly.

I sighed. "No. Not always." I glanced around the bathroom as if the answer was somewhere in the walls. "What about Sakura?"

"No," he answered quickly. "No, not Sakura." He, too, seemed to glance about the walls before hesitantly meeting my eyes. "We're…I don't know…"

"You don't have to tell me—"

"Actually—"

"It's none of my business—"

"It is," Naruto cut me off, and I might've been mishearing things, but he sounded a little stern. Chewing on the inside of his cheek, his blue eyes bored into the towel rack before he let out a sigh and threw his hands up haphazardly. "It's as much your business as it is mine, anyway. Sakura and I…I don't know. I don't know what we are. It's…complicated."

Complicated, indeed.

"Really, Naruto, you don't have to tell me this."

"Why do you do that? Always, why do you do that? It's infuriating." He shook his head and poked my chest. "I want to tell you, Gaara. It's not like I go on autopilot around you and can't control myself. If I tell you something, it's because I want you to know."

I rubbed my chest where his finger had landed, and he watched my hand before slowly meeting my eyes. It was a weird moment, like a flint-induced spark. In a perfect world, he would've realized that that was where he had once given me a hickey. I really wished I had worn a shirt.

"Anyway," he proceeded, "I know you have class, so I'll let you go."

I nodded slowly, watching him smile and turn away. His shoulders hung. He was very good at this. I nearly smacked myself for what I did next.

"Naruto," I said.

He leaned his blond head in the door. "Yeah?"

"We could…talk later, if you want." I could feel the muscles of my face wanting to pull into the standard grimace. "Have dinner or something. Figure this out…" My voice trailed off.

He pulled himself back into the doorway, a confused half-smile on his face. "Okay. Yeah. That sounds great." My mouth started twisting into a leer, but Naruto came before me and held my face. "I know, yes, I know," he said with that smile. "I'm overreacting. Don't glare—_don't _glare. Gosh, you really are impossible." I watched his smile widen, accompanied by an arched brow, by that charismatic fondness. His thumb slipped slightly on my cheek and my mouth twitched. His hands were clammy. His smile faltered. I wondered if he was thinking about several nights ago when he had held my face in much the same way.

"Well, anyway," he dropped his hands, "I could pick you up after class today, if you want?"

"Fine," I said. I didn't feel like fighting with him.

"Fine," he repeated, that grin never leaving his face. After a time, I glared. Chuckling, he left the bathroom. "Yeah, yeah," he said. "I'll get out of your way."

/

I debated standing him up. For about five minutes. God, I was as bad as he was.

For the first time, it wasn't raining as I walked outside and saw him standing there, hands in his pockets and tilted head bearing a smile. That all this was for me frustrated me more than anything, but to avoid him would mean doing exactly what he expected me to do even when facing him meant playing right into his hands.

No. Naruto was certainly not stupid.

I remember times, long ago now, when other students would bring things up, when people like Sakura would bring things up, but they wouldn't be talking to Naruto. Even though he was sitting amongst them, some things were not meant for his ears. They were meant to pass right through. Things like scholarships and conferences and research projects—to them, Naruto was just an art student. Why would he know things like that? Why would he care?

He had surprised even me one night when I told him some of his friends were asking for him on the phone.

"Nah," Naruto shrugged from his bed. "I don't want to go tonight." Hanging up the phone, I stood in place and stared at him until he looked at me and said, "They're not talking to me." He had a sad smile on his face. "Only you talk to me, Gaara."

It was particularly odd for him to have said this, because it wasn't like I was having verbose conversations with him myself. Even when I did talk, it was because he all but forced me to speak. I didn't talk to anyone else, however. I usually just listened. The only person I reacted to was Naruto, whether in anger or annoyance. For him, I suppose, this was enough.

But his comments taught me something, something a little bit startling, a little bit sad. Naruto knew what people thought of him. He knew exactly what they thought. He could determine what they were saying from what they were not saying, just as easily as he could determine what they were not saying from what they said. But he never said anything. Forget the fact that, for some inexplicably-random reason, he could locate every single country in the world on a map, or that he knew entirely too much about quantum mechanics, or that he could capture a sunset in disturbing realism on a napkin using only crayons. People thought they knew him. And for Naruto, this was fine.

I asked him about it once, because it bothered me. For some reason, it really bothered me. He gave me the smile that said _Why do you care?_ I remember glaring and leaving the room.

"What?" he had called after me, innocently. Even though I'm pretty sure he knew.

As soon as Naruto saw me come through the glass doors, he raced to my side looking far more excited than was necessary.

"I know the perfect place," he stated emphatically, looking increasingly disappointed as I stared blankly at him. "For dinner."

"I don't care," I said. As a weird look began to tint his expression, I said, "I don't care where we go."

"I could carry your bag?"

"I'm fine."

He pushed out his lower lip, adding to the long list of what could easily (and maybe only) be titled "Naruto's Awkward Faces." As always, I began walking and he quickly caught up with me.

"Are you mad?" he asked after a little bit.

"No." I trained my eyes on the sidewalk. "It's a long way to walk."

"Are you trying to tell me you're thankful for me picking you up?"

Irritation quickly crept into my voice. "I'm saying it's a long way to walk."

Beside me, Naruto laughed, and our shoulders bumped. He didn't seem to notice but I certainly did. "Anyone else would just say thanks. But not you, Gaara." He leaned over, hands hanging in his pockets as he grinned up at me. "That's why I like you."

"Whatever," was all that I could say.

/

Naruto's idea of the "perfect place" was a small Thai restaurant a few blocks from campus. I asked why we had to go so far when there were other places we could have gone. "I like to get away sometimes," he said. I dropped it.

We didn't really get to talking until we had finished eating. Naruto somehow cajoled our waitress to fix him a ramen dish, while I opted for spicy tofu. He tried a bite of mine, intrigued by the red peppers that he said matched my hair, but no sooner than he had swallowed it, he was downing both our glasses of water. Anyone else probably would have been embarrassed by him coughing up a lung, but the sadistic part of me took secret enjoyment in that moment, too.

"Yeah," he croaked. "Remind me not to try your food again."

The remainders of our dishes were placed in Styrofoam containers. Naruto debated a glass of wine but told our server we'd finish the meal with "the finest fruit juice they had." The poor girl looked at him in confusion before scribbling "2 apple juices" on her pad of paper. With a quaint bow, she left.

Only I knew what he was doing. He would feel bad having a drink when I couldn't. Not after what had happened the last time.

"I never really thought about it until now," Naruto spoke up suddenly. I looked across the table at him. "Before I knew it, it was almost winter break. I guess I picked a bad time to get in a fight with Sakura." When our eyes met, I could tell he was debating telling me more about her or not. There was a good chance he might not. We were close, but not as close as we once were. Things were not exactly like they used to be. This Naruto could not tell me things as easily, just as I no longer could. "At least we're talking again, kind of," he said with a weak smile. "I think everything just started getting to her. I think everything just started getting to everybody."

"Yes," I agreed.

"I guess I could stay with Sakura. I'm sure she wouldn't say no. It's just…I don't know what we are. I don't know if along the way…I got confused or something. I mean, I was so happy to wake up and see her smiling there, to see someone cry for me and tell me how happy they were that I existed, that I was alive. It made me feel…a little bit more than the nothingness I had become. I think I grabbed onto that and didn't want to lose it." There was that failed attempt at a laugh. "How pathetic is that?"

I stared at him. How had I missed this? Little tears were welling up in his eyes, and I could see that he was still one of those people who ignored the lump in his throat, who thought, If I ignore it, it will go away. "It's not pathetic," I said.

He smirked. "Yes, it is."

"_I'll be here."_

"Shut up," I said, expression and tone severe. "You're not pathetic. I don't want to hear you say that again. You have no idea what pathetic is."

Naruto's eyes had widened in slight shock, and thankfully our waitress cut in with our drinks. "Two apple juices," she said cheerfully. With a wink, she added, "From only the finest apples."

"Thanks," Naruto said with a grateful smile. He loved it when people played along with him.

"Together or separate?"

"Together," Naruto said at the same time I said, "Separate." Giving me a reproachful look, he said again, "Together." The girl scratched something on the bill before handing it to him and taking her exit. "Don't look at me like that," Naruto said, eyes scanning over the check. "I'm taking care of it. Don't even try stopping me." He closed the black billfold and tossed it on the table. It was not his current priority.

"You can stay with me," I muttered.

"What?"

"For winter break," I said. "You can stay with me."

"But…but it's a month. A whole month. I can't burden you like that."

"Fine. Stay with Sakura."

His mouth was hanging open again, just slightly. "You…I don't even know what to say to you right now. Are you serious? Really? I really can?"

"_Yes_."

"Well…well, thanks, Gaara. Really, really, thanks so much—"

"Don't," I cut him short.

"I know, I know," he smiled. "Don't overreact. 'It was nothing; it doesn't mean anything,'" he mimicked me. I felt my eye twitch, sitting there and watching him impersonate me. But soon he was laughing again, laughing at his own jokes, and I was just glad that he wasn't making that pitiful face anymore. Glad. Yes, I was glad. "You always know just what to say."

"Whatever."

"Whatever, whatever," he practically sang.

Despite my burgeoning irritation, it was times like this when I thought, Everything will be fine. _We_ will be fine.

It was also times like this when I was wrong.

/

We loitered outside like two elementary school kids. It was nighttime now. The moon was a glowing orb and someone had punched holes in the sky for stars. I sat at a table in an abandoned patio and watched while Naruto jumped from chair to chair, nearly breaking his neck several times. The humid temperature in the air reminded me of his hands from earlier—not entirely unwelcome.

"Look at me," he said, hopping to the center of a concrete table top and punching his fists into the air. "I'm the king of the world!"

"You're going to wake up the neighborhood," I said. Naruto looked at me, considered this. With a graceful leap, he was back on the ground, walking a few steps before lounging in a chair beside mine.

"Did you mean what you said back there?" he asked, suddenly.

"Back where," I said.

"At the restaurant. When you said I wasn't pathetic. Did you really mean it?"

I faced him with a cynical stare, wondering why on earth he was bringing that up again. He looked back at me, equally cynical.

"Yes," I said.

Glancing toward the ground, I watched his face break into an awkward smile. "Thanks. It was nice of you to say."

_Stop it_. I wanted to say. I wanted to say that I didn't just say it, that I meant it. But I didn't.

Laughter erupted from somewhere nearby, and we watched as a couple passed by us on the sidewalk, holding hands and running into one another in their punch-drunk love. At one point, the young woman stopped, pulling on the man's hand so that he leaned in and kissed her. He started laughing halfway into it and she punched him rather hard, it seemed, in the abdomen, but as they continued down the walkway, tiny giggles spilling from their mouths, I felt something in me that could've only been a strange form of partiality.

"That's cute," Naruto said, emotion bared plainly in his voice.

"You should make up with Sakura," I stated point-blank.

"I should," he murmured reflectively. "Man, though, what if she wants to have makeup sex?" My face must have been completely mortified, because he took one look at me and started laughing. "Seriously, though, Gaara. I've never…" He caught himself. "I won't remember what to do."

Glaring, I turned away from him. "You'll be fine."

Silence descended upon the moment, and I could imagine Naruto sitting there casually as he pinned me with a contemplative stare. Drop it, I thought.

Of course, he didn't.

"What was it like…for us?" he asked. His voice had that weird quality to it—not exactly one, distinct emotion. Not exactly curious, not exactly sad. I closed my eyes for a moment as if, by closing them, I could will the moment away, will him away, will everything away. He seemed to come back to me stronger than ever then, and all I could think about was his face as he smiled down at me from my chest.

"_I'm glad my first time was with you."_

"Was it bad?" he spoke up again, concerned.

I opened my eyes and stared at the space in front of me. My voice came out a bit more miserable than I wanted it to as I said, "No."

"I'm sorry," Naruto said quietly. Time seemed to pass by in more silence, but it was not awkward silence. With him, it was never awkward. Eventually, he spoke up again. "Sakura told me…that I held onto your memories. She said I didn't want to let you go." I was startled when he touched my arm, his hand landing lightly on my bicep. "You were an important person to me. You are."

I could feel a headache threatening, realizing quickly that it was because my face had shifted into a consistent grimace. If he could've seen my face, he would've seen it all—that pain.

"You do like me, don't you," Naruto said. It was not a question.

"Yes."

I wanted to smile as he asked, helpless: "What do I do?" Sometimes he could be so very helpless.

"Nothing."

In that moment, I had never felt so weak, like I couldn't do anything, like nothing could be done, nothing.

"I'm not going to force you to talk about it," Naruto said, "but I think you should."

"There's nothing to say. Just forget about it."

"Forget it?"

How cruel. To ask him this, how cruel of me. But I wanted this. If there was one thing I wanted him to forget, to just leave alone, it was this. "I don't want to feel this way," I told him. "I wish I didn't like you. God, I wish…" I paused, swallowed hard. "I wish nothing had ever happened. But it did. And I'll live." Finally, I turned to face him with what I hoped was a firm expression. "I'll get over it."

It was so much easier than saying, "I'll get over you."

/

The air of awkwardness descended as we walked home. Finally, I thought.

Naruto didn't talk to me. He didn't fill the silence. He didn't comment on the cemetery as we passed it, or the sleeping dog in the backyard. We just walked. Though what was there to say?

I considered idly that if anything would tear us apart, it would be this. It would most certainly be this. Not because Naruto couldn't accept my homosexuality, or even the fact that I had feelings for him. What would hurt him the most, kill him inside, would be my pain. I knew this. He did not like it when people got hurt because of him. He hated it. It turned him upon himself.

"Maybe you should stay with Sakura," I said when we were both in the apartment.

"No," Naruto said. "I want to stay with you."

I looked at him, exhausted, and decided that I wasn't going to argue with him. He was looking at the couch, maybe trying to remember, maybe trying to forget. Suddenly, his face seemed to come to life.

"I have to go to the doctor tomorrow," he said. "I nearly forgot. Gosh, that could've been bad."

"Is Sakura taking you?"

"No. She's going to be in the lab. Sometimes I walk. But it's fine; I like walking."

He gave me a small smile, and I continued to stare at him before telling him to wait there for a moment—that I would be right back. I walked down the hall and opened up the storage closet. It was there. It was right where it had always been. Even in the dark, I could see it perfectly. The paint almost seemed to give off a faint glow.

Naruto didn't smile when I wheeled the yellow bicycle into the living room. He didn't express any sort of recognition either. He simply stared at the bike, and then at me.

"Here," I said, leaning it against the wall.

"For me?" he asked, clearly confused.

"It was yours." Arching a nonexistent brow, I looked from the bike to the floor. "Consider it a late birthday gift or something."

Naruto approached the bicycle as if any moment it would transform into a human-eating contraption. It was interesting to watch, his hesitation. His hand glanced from the handles to the body, to the seat, where it rested.

"It's really for me?" he said, faltering blue eyes locked on my face. It was one of the few things that had not changed about him—his absolute disbelief when people did things for him. It could have been as simple as picking him up a pack of pens on the way home, or as mindless as giving him a bicycle which had already been his. Either way, it didn't matter. For some reason, Naruto was always dumbfounded when people considered him. It was rather heartrending, when one thought about it.

"I won't say it again," I said, starting to walk off. I hadn't made it three steps before Naruto grasped my arm, causing me to turn and glare at him. He was making a strange face, his expression flickering somewhere in the realm of helplessness. "What?" I asked.

He continued to look at me like that, with that—that _face_, until my worst fears were realized. A hand flattened upon my back and the other curled around my shoulders as he pulled me into his embrace. His face was buried in my neck so that I felt his lips move when he told me, sincerely: "Thank you." The words trickled across my skin, and I almost shivered. It felt like one of those hugs one gives when something bad has happened. There is the initial hug, but then there is the tight squeeze tacked onto the end that blossoms perfectly into the moment. His hug was a little bit like that, and a little bit not. There was no initial, gentle embrace. It was intense to begin with. It almost hurt.

To think that after all I had done to avoid him, we were here again. I had resisted him with such a vengeance, and it was with that same vengeance that we came together. Our moment was still to come, and when it came, it came with the string, but we both sat back and watched as it was drawn out until it snapped, so that there was not one of us less responsible than the other when that happened. At some point, the embrace stopped meaning _thank you_ and became something else. I realized this when his face turned ever so slightly and his fingers moved so that I could feel them on my waist. I felt his lips on my neck, his mouth, and the memory of those lips trailing across my skin was all too familiar.

I would think later that I caused it to happen, that for once in my life, I had willed something to happen and it had. I could feel Naruto's lips as they parted for speech, but he never did say anything as those very same lips pressed against gently against my neck. And then I did shiver. Why hadn't we turned on the lights? What time was it? Thoughts like these sprung into my mind and out again as I tried to concentrate, as I tried to level my voice, level my voice. No, I wanted to say. _No_. His hand was hot again as he shifted slightly, pressing it onto my neck so that my head tilted faintly as his lips settled again beneath my jaw. Careful. He was being so careful with me. It made me want to laugh, or cry. His lips grazed the spot beneath my ear, and I did bring my hand up then. It was resting on his hip before I even realized I had placed it there. Pulling back, Naruto faced me. He was close, his hand still positioned gently on my neck.

A moment, a smile. The falling away of that smile. Naruto as he leaned in, kissed me. The steady dissolution of that moment.

His lips met mine with an adolescent shyness. In my defense, I did not think he would. In his defense, I let him. I let him kiss me, his lips tentative at first, careful. It was what I wish my first kiss had been like, rather than the reckless mashing of lips that it was. The raw spot in me that I had foolishly believed to be healed began to throb then. I could feel some part of myself wanting to reach out and draw him nearer, and I know I scared us both when I pulled his hips flush to mine. The kiss changed then. Both of Naruto's hands found their way to my face as he kissed me again, and then again. I closed my eyes and gradually began to respond, knowing, _knowing_ that I would look upon this moment with great regret later. I knew this. But later seemed so far away. Later was not now. Now was Naruto kissing me, softly, my hands on his back, my fingers wound in his shirt. Now was my own lips searching out his own, the heat of his body, his mouth. The building insistency of his lips, the building insistency of that moment. My foot moving and brushing the bicycle.

The bicycle. Naruto's yellow bicycle.

Naruto.

"_I don't know…exactly how I feel about you."_

Pulling back, I shook my head. The sudden movement seemed wrong, as if I had thrown something essential off kilter. "No."

"…No?"

"We can't." And there was my face shifting into a glare.

I had purposefully avoided his eyes, but that no longer mattered as I could hear it all in his voice. "We…can't?" he said slowly. "But Gaara…"

"_No_," I said again, tone strict. "You don't know what you're doing."

"I don't—" he started to repeat me, stopping himself. "Gaara," he said my name again. He really could be so very helpless. But I could not help him with this. Not me, not this.

I rubbed my face, starting slightly and pulling away when I felt his hands on my arms. "No," I said, glaring at him. He was frowning. He was sad. He was confused. Of course, he was confused. I was confused. How did we get here? He noticed me shuffling in my bag and asked, "What are you doing?"

"I have to go," I said.

This seemed to put some sense back into him, for he stiffened at my words. "You can't," he said. Ignoring him, I pulled out my keys. "Gaara, don't," he pleaded with me. "We should…talk. We need to talk about this."

"There's nothing to talk about. You overreacted; that's all. It doesn't mean anything."

I would've given anything not to have seen him in that moment—not to have seen his pleading blue eyes, his hand on the door, his face with those flickering expressions, not to have heard his last, helpless, "Don't do this, Gaara," as I disregarded him and slipped out the door.

/

Shikamaru didn't ask any questions when I showed up to his room. He was clearly dressed for bed with his baggy sweats and plain white t-shirt, and he might have even been in bed, but he let me in anyway. His apartment smelled faintly of smoke, and I glanced momentarily at the cigarette dangling from his lips, a faint orange glow suffusing the tip.

"Throw your things wherever," he said, pulling his hair up into a ponytail. I sat down on a flowery, hand-me-down sofa and said nothing as Shikamaru came in several times bringing something different—a pillow, a blanket, a heavier blanket—each time. Once, he stopped, standing still for a moment and looking as if he might ask a question, but he never did. It was not white—more of a puke-green—but at least I had a wall. At least I had that nothingness into which my thoughts could dissolve. My phone rang, and his voice was suddenly filling the room.

"_Hey, it's Naruto, your favorite person ever! Pick up, Gaara. You know you want to…And yes, I've hijacked your phone."_

At some point (who knew when) he must have gotten my phone and switched the ringtone to the stupid recording. I shut my phone completely off. A ways away, Shikamaru finished his cigarette and stubbed it out in a nearby ashtray. It wasn't long before there was a knock at the door, awakening the bitter reminder that even now, he could still find me. It didn't matter where I was. He would find me.

Sighing, Shikamaru walked to the door, opening it just a crack. "Yeah?" he said.

"Hey Shikamaru," Naruto's voice, surprisingly calm, spilled through the break. "Is Gaara here?"

"No."

There was a moment of quiet before the blond said, "Just tell him I'm sorry. Tell him it was my fault. Tell him—tell him I really need to speak with him. Please, will you tell him that?"

Shikamaru released a weary breath. "If I see him."

This must have been enough for Naruto, or he must have known it was all he would get, because Shikamaru closed the door, scratching his neck and shaking his head at me. "I swear. You two…" He pulled out another cigarette and leaned against the wall as he lit it. Taking a small inhale, he sent two streams of smoke out his nostrils. "You've got a thing for him or something, right?" I remained quiet, expression set. "It doesn't matter to me or anything, but you two are friends. Hurry up and make up so I don't have to start running a hotel." He took another drag of his cigarette and went to his room.

I didn't sleep that night. I lay there and tried to retrace my steps from this morning. From the bathroom to the restaurant to the apartment. From his smile to my mouth. From his hug to his kiss. From _thank you_ to this. Nothing was making sense. Nothing. What had he done? Did he realize what he had done? And what had I done? I should've stopped him earlier—before it progressed where it did. I should've pushed him away. But he had this…he had this effect on me. For as long as I could remember, he was always making it so that I couldn't push him away. It didn't matter if he was straight and suddenly climbing on top of me in a car, his hand unfastening my pants, or if that hand actually made it into my pants just as he made his way into me. It didn't matter. I couldn't stop him. Something in me…something, some stupid, _stupid _part of me thought that it needed him.

I was so tired. I didn't want to live like this, to constantly pine after someone so oblivious and yet so aware. To have to be around such a person constantly…I was tired. My feelings really were deadening. I had done it before; I could do this. He didn't realize that I had done this before, that to keep functioning, to survive, I had done this. And before, it had been so much worse. Because of him, because he was doomed to forget, I, too, had to make myself forget. Compared to the last time, it would certainly not be easy, but it would also not be hard. If I just buried my feelings deep enough, things would be fine. They would. But this required certain things.

It meant that the next day when I returned to the apartment just as he was wheeling the bicycle down the front walk, I looked at him only to acknowledge him. It meant I immediately quelled any reaction to the helpless look on his face, the pain there. It meant I did not stop when he said my name calmly at first, and then more urgently. It meant I walked up to the apartment and shut the door, immediately going to my computer and ordering two tickets to La Suna. I would do this, but this would be all. I would not go back on what I had already said. To avoid him now would only prolong this. It meant I allowed myself to think about it one last time—the gentle pressure of his lips on mine—before I pushed it far away into the over-and-done-with and turned to my homework.

When Naruto returned, he did not bring it up. He said a quiet hello, and that was all. And he would not bring it up again, not this. I knew exactly what I was doing by spending the night at Shikamaru's. If we had talked about it…No. It merely mattered that we did not talk about it. Such a sensitive subject had a limited time in which to discuss it, and that time had passed. That time was gone. It was like the night when he held my face in his hands and stared at me. If we had discussed it then, if we had talked about it then…But we didn't. Those moments were dangerous. They were also gone. Naruto knew better than to bring it up again with me, and I knew him well enough to know he would deal with it in his own way. And he did.

Winter break was in two weeks. I watched Naruto's attitude shift in rather interesting ways over the course of those two weeks. Psychologists would've had a field day with him, though I could only imagine what they would've said about me. For the first few days, he didn't say much of anything to me, and some days he said nothing at all. I flat out ignored him. I could only imagine the thoughts swimming in his mind. He had kissed a boy, he had kissed me, and he was probably wondering what that meant. Then would come the reasoning, the endless reasoning. If there was one thing Naruto could do that I could not do, it was to reason things out expertly in his mind, making them okay, making them harmless. It was just like his suggestion to sleep with me—he was able to reason that it would mean nothing, that it was harmless, that we were friends so why should it matter? Even now, I could see in his steady change in behavior that he was expertly reasoning things out.

Week one was very quiet, slightly tense. The occasional hello, the rare goodnight. It was the development toward full sentences, to asking how my day was, to telling me how his was without my asking. It was him reading in the living room and me in the bedroom. It was a stolen glance toward him with the strange realization that I was still alive. It was the endless distance between us. I would be lying if I said week one was easy.

Week two was the madness of tests and papers, oral examinations. Week two was the return of Sakura laughing at him in the kitchen and the practiced reinforcement of his smile. I was gone for most of week two. When I was there, on the off chance that he was there too, he sent me his broken smile but rarely said anything. He asked how my exams were going. I told him. His speech with me was clipped, careful. Formulaic even. Forced. By week two, I was fine when he reached over me one morning from where I stood at the counter and grabbed a cereal bowl, his chest brushing against my back. I was fine when Sakura kissed his cheek on her way out the door. I was fine when he took the yellow bicycle out. Biking became his coping mechanism. Whenever he started to get that look his eyes, that half-helpless, half-frustrated look, he would take the bicycle out.

By the end of week two, he was smiling and laughing as usual. Only once did he falter when, arriving late one night and finding me working at the kitchen table, he told me that Sakura had said he could stay with her.

I looked him square in the eye, my face blank. "I already ordered the tickets."

If anything told him that what had happened meant nothing, that I did not care about what had happened between us, it was this. His smile, if it could be called that, was heartbreaking.

"Okay," he said.

/

The flight was long. No, it _felt _long. Much longer than it actually was. Naruto and I were seated next to one another, but we might as well have been on opposite sides of the plane. I kept my nose in a book, and he stared listlessly in front of him, thoughts lost in space. At one point, I placed my hand on the armrest, startled the find Naruto's hand already there, but he removed it without a word, allowing my own to take its place. I occasionally glanced out the window, watching as the clouds disappeared to reveal endless deserts and sprouts of green as the plane began its descent.

The airport wasn't horribly crowded, and we were able to pick up our luggage without incident and even catch a cab rather quickly, which Naruto paid for.

"Thanks," I said, placing a bag between us, anything.

"No problem," he replied. And the driver proceeded toward the address I gave him in silence. It was peacefully quiet as the cab sped through town, which eventually became country, sand and dirt indistinguishable from one another. At first, Naruto said nothing, but his curiosity soon got the best of him as he pressed his hands to the window and let out an amused "Wow." From then on, he was pointing everything out as if I had never seen it before. "Look at that mountain," he'd say. "Is that even a mountain? Or is that a hill? Wow," he continued, praising the landscape which I, too, loved. Eventually, he looked over at me with a smile and said, "It's beautiful here," in such a way that I was able to realize that as much as I still loved that smile, things were finally okay again. It wasn't long before his comments grew irritating, and I was soon telling him to shut up—that I was trying to read. His resulting laugh pulled the usual glare from me.

It didn't matter that, deep down, there was still a skewed part of myself that wanted to close the space between us, to take his hand into mine, or that I felt something weird when Sakura kissed him, or that I wanted his hands on my face, on me. No, it didn't matter. It only mattered that he was smiling and laughing, and that I could sit beside him calmly and not break down.

When the cab pulled up to the brown tri-level situated several miles from town, I realized nostalgically that it felt good to be back, to be home. Temari greeted me at the door, running her fingers through my hair with a small smile on her face. Neither of us were the hugging sort; it didn't matter if I hadn't seen her in several months. Affection was a thing that had always been rare at our house. She gave Naruto a less-warm gaze, but he just smiled at her, harboring enough warmth for all three of us.

"Hi," he said cheerfully. "I'm Naruto."

As if his excitement was somehow stolen from her, she frowned. "I know." They had met before—my freshman year—and after his usual coaxing, they had actually gotten along (although Temari would never admit this). There were few, if any, who could resist his charm. Even my brother, who told me after meeting him that he was "a pompous asshole," was playing cards with him or going out with him to parties whenever he visited. But that was before. When I had come home that dreadful summer, it was my siblings who observed my steady emotional decline, and it scared them. They hadn't thought me capable of forging any sort of deep connection with anyone, so to see me so dejected because of one person, and to be helpless to do anything about it, they were scared. One of them was always close by when I called him, although they always had an excuse prepared if I asked what they were doing. Even with them there, I couldn't stop from crawling into myself after I hung up the phone, his cheerful voice still echoing in my ears and making me wonder what small fact about me he might have forgotten that day.

"Are you okay?" they would always ask, and what scared them even more was the fact that I said, truthfully, "No." I had forgotten how much pain there was in this house. The very same house where, as a young boy, I had walked into my father's study and found him dead, the gun on the floor, the blood on his head. The very same house where, after Naruto finally forgot me, I considered killing myself as well. But only for a moment. The very same house where I was supposed to find a way to keep living with him gone, the bastard I had fallen in love with—where no amount of words from Temari or Kankurou could change the fact that, for a while there, I really was lost without him. And how strange to know that, even with him standing less than two feet away from me, I was no less lost.

"I'm Temari," my sister spoke up, skepticism plainly bared. She did not like him. One of the reasons why I respected her was that she never did hide how she truly felt. "You'll be sleeping downstairs in the spare bedroom. I'll show you."

As she passed me, Temari gave me a poorly-concealed look of concern before graciously leading Naruto out of my sight. I stood in place for a moment, took a deep breath, and then I headed upstairs to where both my siblings' rooms and my own were located. It was good that we would not be sharing a room—Naruto and I. I needed some time to myself, and even with him here, it would be easier for me to avoid him in the privacy of my own room. He had been to my house once before, during one of the school breaks, but he had stayed in my room. He had insisted and I did not resist. He had even slept in my bed with me. That was before I felt anything other than friendship or annoyance toward him, before I realized just what that annoyance meant.

I heard someone climb the steps and was relieved to find Temari in my doorway. "It's almost time for dinner," she said. "I can make whatever you like."

"I'm not hungry," I told her.

She accepted this. She would not push. But then she did push, just a little. "Naruto…he's changed."

My mouth felt dry as I said, "Yes."

"…But not completely."

I stared at the carpet. "No."

With a tired sigh, she checked one of her ponytails. "Well, I'll tell him you're going to bed early and not to disturb you. Kankurou will be back later. He's still at work. He might check in on you."

"Thank you, Temari," I said. She looked at me and nodded, closing the door softly behind her.

Kankurou was not as quiet when he stopped by later. I had fallen asleep after attempting to put away some clothes, suddenly finding myself extremely tired. I had left the light on, which he switched off, but it was the haphazard closing of my door that awakened me, however momentarily. I quickly fell back asleep. For the first time in a long while, I dreamt. In the dream, Naruto and I were back on the plane. When I put my hand on the armrest, surprised to find Naruto's already there, I didn't move it. I lay it flat on top of his. Soon, he turned his hand over and held mine as if it was completely normal. He stared into space while I read on in my book. The dream was especially weird because we never said anything. Everything was simply understood, as it often is in dreams.

/

I was glad to find that Naruto was gone the next morning, having taken Kankurou's bicycle and peddling into town "for exploratory purposes," as he termed it. Kankurou sneered as he repeated this, pouring us both a cup of orange juice and making me realize he was back to hating him. Even I knew this "hatred" would not last very long.

"Good riddance, I say," Kankurou said, taking a long swig of his juice. He looked at me and frowned. "How have you been?"

I knew what he was referring to but pretended like I didn't. "Fine," I said.

Unlike Naruto, Kankurou knew when to drop it. He patted my shoulder and rested his hand there. "It's good to have you back."

We finished breakfast mostly in silence, Kankurou punctuating it to tell me about the banality of his job and how Temari still had one week of school left and would be gone for most of the mornings. Eventually he left for his "mundane responsibility to the world," leaving me alone in the kitchen, which grew exponentially hotter as the morning wore on. Finally, I opened a window, appreciating the cool breeze that wafted into the room as I sat down with my book to read.

I suppose I expected him to be gone longer than he was, or perhaps I was drawn too deeply into my book, because I was extremely surprised when Naruto arrived, the storm door banging lightly behind him. He apparently didn't expect to see me either.

"Hey," he said, frozen by the door. When I didn't reply, he went on. "It's amazing here. The reception's not that great, but that's okay. I don't want to call anyone anyway." He stopped talking and I looked down at my book. He didn't take the hint. "Your brother doesn't like me, does he?" he asked, surprising me with the forwardness of his question. "And neither does your sister?"

"No," I said, glancing up at him for a short moment. I expected him to start whining, to ask "Why?" But he didn't. All he said was "Understandable," taking off his dusty shoes and carrying them downstairs to his room.

I didn't see him again until dinner, where he proceeded to annoy the hell out of Temari while she set the table.

"No, I don't need help," she said through clenched teeth, placing a folk, spoon, and knife on either side of a glass plate.

"Are you sure?" Naruto inquired, making that the tenth time he had posed said question.

"_Yes._"

Naruto started laughing then, and Temari looked at him as if he had completely lost it. "You two are definitely related," he said, looking at us both. Temari's glare mirrored my own, but only succeeding in making him laugh even more.

"Christ, you're annoying," she said, struggling to maintain the impatience in her voice. "Now hand me the bowl of salad—_before_ I change my mind."

He had won her over. Neither of them realized it yet, nor were they even thinking along those terms, but I saw it. Kankurou was a little harder.

"You're in my seat, asshole," he announced when he came home from work. We had already started eating, as we usually did when he was running late.

"Whoops," Naruto said congenially. He moved to the other empty seat. "My bad. Sorry about that."

During that first week, Kankurou never called him by name, even when talking to me. Especially when talking to me. It was always, "The asshole did this," or "The prick did that," and there was real malice in his voice when he spoke. I wondered if maybe Kankurou could not be won over this time, but then, gradually, Naruto chipped away at his icy exterior, like the skilled artist that he was. It became, "You'll never believe what the asshole did this time," and soon it was, "Naruto is really getting on my nerves." Again, this was not a shift that my brother realized, but I saw it. I saw it all. I didn't feel bitter about either. It's not as if I wanted them to hate him, and I knew Naruto was not purposefully manipulating them so much as they could not resist the person that he was.

He helped Temari with dinner—with the small things that he could not mess up, and he sat back and watched as Kankurou played around with spare car parts in the back of the house until my brother started asking him, "Hand me that, asshole. No—_that_. I swear to god, Naruto…" And instead of being intimidated by either of them, Naruto always laughed. I'm convinced that this is what threw them off more than anything. He wasn't laughing at them, but more so at himself. How could they be mad at that?

There were times when they would look at me and remember, and real anger would creep back into their voices, but they were also confused by the situation. I had invited Naruto there, so what did that mean? Did it mean that I had gotten over it, over him? They weren't sure. And as long as they weren't sure, they weren't sure how to assess the situation. Naruto disappeared by way of bike nearly every morning, but he did talk to me when he was at the house, so he wasn't exactly avoiding me. And I didn't spend quite as much time as I could've in my room, opting to work in the kitchen at certain times during the day, so I wasn't exactly avoiding him. Nothing was happening exactly, and that was the problem. But they did not realize that this was good. Only when things happened did everything go terribly wrong. I was content to live in this strange limbo of things not exactly happening, of him not exactly looking at me the way a friend would, and me not exactly feeling toward him as one would toward a friend. As long as things did not _happen_.

But of course. They did.

/

I was at the table one morning when I heard Naruto jogging up the steps. I had thought he had already left on his ritual trip, so this threw me off.

"Hey," he said, lopsided smile on his face. He looked a little thrown off to see me there, too. Grabbing a red apple for the woven basket in the middle of the table, he took a seat across from me. "Did you eat yet?"

"Yes," I said, looking down toward my book.

"Good," he said, causing me to look at him suspiciously. His smile only increased that suspicion. "I need your help."

"With what?" I said unenthusiastically.

"I want you to show me the house. Well, I want you to bring me to the house. I know I could go into town and get directions, but it's in the opposite direction; I know that much. Plus, I'd get lost. I need a guide. I need you—," he peeled a blue sticker off the apple, "—to help me, of course."

I continued to stare at him. He was serious. Though I had to admit, I was not exactly surprised. It was only a matter of time before he found out about the house, and I knew his personality enough to expect the instantaneous infatuation he developed for strange things. This list included everything from kangaroo cats, to grapples, to me. It was only a matter of time before it came to include the house.

Three years ago, a tornado had torn through La Suna, wreaking havoc on the countryside. Tornadoes were not uncommon to the area, but this particular tornado was a bit more violent than all the rest. It touched down just outside of a small farming community, destroying everything. Its mission seemed to be ruin—annihilation. Nothing was spared, everything tossed up and thrown somewhere else. But in an odd twist of fate, there was one house that was picked up, the very foundation torn out of the earth so that it hovered oddly above the ground. It was not airborne for very long—less than fifteen seconds—but it landed very carefully. Disturbingly-carefully. Things inside were roughed up and mangled, but from the outside, the cream-colored two-story looked perfect. I'd seen footage, and it disturbed me that such things were possible, and that they did happen. Naruto, of course, was fascinated by it.

It took us thirty minutes to get there by bike. As much as I just wanted to tell him where it was, I didn't want him to get lost or killed by a coyote (contrary to popular belief, I'm sure). Because Naruto was the type of person to get killed by a coyote, just as I was the type of person to get blamed for it.

And I was also not going to take the car. I still hadn't fixed the headlight after our last little escapade. No, the car remained locked up in the shed out back. Out of sight; out of mind. Naruto seemed perfectly content with biking, though—maybe a little too content, but maybe I was the one overreacting.

He didn't pay very much attention to me at all on the way over. Sometimes he even closed his eyes for a short stretch of road, the wind ruffling his blond hair like an invisible hand. He was a person made for the outdoors. I was not. I considered physical activity to be arranging books on a shelf or reading. Naruto was the rock-climbing, mountain-biking, cliff-diving sort. I was the _this is my corner, leave me alone and we'll be fine_ sort.

And it was hot. I had jeans on, which did not help, and the thin, gray button-up, though airy and short-sleeved, was still too much. It was a typical morning in La Suna—the sun beating down, really beating down, as if in defiance of the winter season. Today there was almost no breeze.

"You're lucky," Naruto said. He didn't look at me, but I could see the small smile gracing his features. "To live in such a place and have siblings that love you…you're very lucky." I stared down at the moving ground beneath my wheels, wondering where that comment had come from. "And to have me as a friend," he turned toward me and grinned, "you're doubly blessed."

I glared at him, and he laughed so that the sound seemed to get left behind as the house came into view. There was still a good bit of debris all over the place, but in the space where the house sat, one would doubt seriously that a tornado had been anywhere near the place.

"Unbelievable," Naruto said when we got there, hopping off his bike and leaning it against the front of the house. I did the same. When Naruto decided to venture into the house as I knew he would, I followed him, not wanting to deal with the scorching sun on my arms and neck.

The house was just a bit eerie on the inside. In a strange contrast, it was also tranquil in a calm-after-the-storm sort of way. There was little of anything left—anything of value having been salvaged or stolen long ago, so that only the flaking wallpaper and cracked furniture occupied the space.

"Be careful," Naruto said, the ground creaking beneath him. I ignored him, walking around him and making my way, steadily, down the hall. The staircase had completely collapsed in on itself, and a cloud of glittering dust seemed to hover in the air, everywhere. Several pictures, torn and dusty, lined the hallway floor, and several doors had been torn completely from the jambs. The house had the feeling of being from another time. I felt an odd inclination toward it.

A particular room caught my eye. It rested at the end of the hall to the right, and I noticed it because light seemed to spill out of it like milk, the dust sparkling lively there. When I finally reached it, having to climb over a fallen bookcase in the process, I was astonished to find that it was a small nursery. This room was by far the least damaged; I did not need to explore the rest of the house to know this. A wooden crib fit snuggly into one corner, and a rocker creaked lightly from the breeze that snuck in through the broken window. I recalled hearing that everyone had made it out in time, unharmed, and this sudden recollection relieved me for some reason.

Turning to leave, I froze when I saw that Naruto stood in the doorway. He was pinning me with a weird look, as if he knew what I was feeling about the room and felt that way too. It didn't make me feel any less cornered. I steadied my gaze, and Naruto's narrowed just slightly, as if he now knew how I felt about him—that I felt like the room had suddenly started shrinking. He was going to say something; I could tell. I watched his fingers curl around the doorframe, and I could see his jaw clench. I wondered if Sakura noticed such things, but, then again, he was not the same person with Sakura that he was with me.

His lips parted slightly, and I seriously hoped that my firm expression and unyielding features told him _No_.

For the first time in a long time, he dropped it. I could see his stance relax—concede, his blue eyes with that poignant blue in them as he stepped aside and gestured toward the hall. A kind of _after you_ gesture.

We left the house in silence, grabbing our bicycles and wheeling them back to the road. Suddenly, Naruto was angry.

"Can we talk later?" he asked.

So he hadn't dropped it at all. Goddamn him. I gripped the handles and tried my best to remain calm. "About what?"

"You know about what." I looked at him and his face softened. "Please," he said, to which I looked away from him. "If you really don't want to, then we won't. Then I'll drop it. I'll never bring it up again—"

"Fine," I said.

"…Fine?"

"Yes."

"Yes," he repeated, as if he had expected me to say no. Hell, _I_ had expected me to say no. "Okay…Okay." He didn't look ecstatic, or even happy that I agreed. That made two of us. Naruto got on his bike and told me to go back without him. He had things to do and would meet up with me later. I wondered if "things to do" meant meeting up with one of the many girls that had started coming to the house and asking for him—Sakura or no Sakura.

If nothing else, I would be able to take this opportunity to articulate to him that I did not want to have this conversation again and that I would be moving out of the apartment and he could stay there for all I cared. Because I cared. And because I didn't want to anymore.

/

What did later mean?

I pondered this as I rode back, and when I got there. Did later mean thirty minutes, an hour? Several? Did later mean dinner time, or after? Did later mean tomorrow? Never?

It was around one o'clock when I peddled up the drive, brown dust rising on either side of me so that I nearly lost sight of Kankurou. He was rummaging around by the side of the house, and when he spotted me, he brushed his hands on his pants and walked out to meet me.

"Whoa," he said, cracking a playful smirk. "I never thought I'd see you on that thing again." I gave him a baleful look, recalling a past time when, after first having my training wheels removed, Kankurou had pushed me down a hill. His smirk seemed to imply that he was considering the same situation. "Where'd you go?"

"The house."

"Alone?" It was kind of funny to watch his realization dawn, to see the hesitant _Oh_ in his eyes, and the following seriousness there. "Where is he?"

Uncharacteristically, I shrugged, pulling the bike up to the house and putting it to rest there. Kankurou followed me.

"He keeps asking about you," he said. "Stupid things. He asked what you were like as a little kid, and if you always wanted to be a history professor." I glanced at him and he looked troubled. "Some of the questions, he's even asked before." Before. Before the world collapsed. "He's such an asshole." I could see that my brother was in pain. He had lost a friend too. "Anyway, I do have a surprise for you. Well, I guess it's not really a surprise since I'm telling you, but it's a gift nonetheless. At least it will be when it's done." After all that had happened to our family, my brother was unable to smile. He could only smirk, the expression akin to Naruto's broken grin. "I'm fixing your car," he said. "I know—it wasn't necessary and all that, but I had some free time. Plus, Naruto insisted, and as much of a prick as he is, it was a good idea." He gave me a careful look. "Maybe he's not so bad."

For a minute there, I considered telling my brother that Naruto really was nothing but a prickish asshole, before settling with the dubious "Maybe" that left my lips. Kankurou watched as I sighed and headed back into the house, wanting a shower but also just wanting to do nothing. Even a book seemed especially tedious. Everything seemed a weak attempt to block out the inevitable later. Later. Later.

I'd think about it all later. The air was hot, and I was tired. If Naruto showed up, fine, we'd talk, and if not, I could deal with pushing everything out of over-and-done-with to the later pile. Because later was not now.

Even my room was warm, nearly stifling as I opened the door. The ice in the cup of water I had brought up seemed to instantaneously dissolve. I took a few sips, placing it on my desk before pulling my window open. Though it was not cold, the air that pushed into my room gave the impression of coolness, and I was thankful for it. The early-afternoon light painted the room in golden hues that made it not quite seem like my room. My bed creaked slightly as I lay on it, my bare arms warmed by the hot blanket beneath me. That warmth lulled me gradually into a half-sleep, so that I was certainly not awake but could hear when Kankurou came in and out of the house, or when Temari came in to ask me a question or maybe to tell me something, pausing before slipping out quietly. Every once in a while, I would slip into my thoughts, so that it was not quite a dream and not quite consciousness as I thought about Naruto and his promise of later. His insistent later. His stubborn later. Stubborn, yes. And then I realized that someone was in the room again, or perhaps it was a dream. I could feel a presence, something, a voice which seemed to say _Go to sleep. I didn't mean to wake you. _Something. Something nice. One nice thing amidst all that chaos.

I must've finally fallen quite deeply into sleep then, because it was some time before I became aware of my room again, of that space. It was around 2:30, so the room was still lit in yellow-gold, except that now it seemed even richer. I sat up, feeling that post-nap funk that makes one wonder why they even took a nap in the first place, and deciding that a shower was definitely in order.

I couldn't have made a better decision. The warm water snapped me back to awareness, even when that awareness was an awareness of later. I probably still had time to tell him no, that I had changed my mind, but then I remembered when I used to actually _want_ to talk things out with him, when I wanted that closure. Maybe I also wanted it now.

My hair was still damp and feathering up at the ends when he showed up at my door. I had (thankfully) just pulled my shirt on and was sitting on the edge of the bed. His face was contorted into another one of those funny little faces. A part of me loved those faces. The masochistic part. The claustrophobia I should've felt with him standing there seemed to meander about the edges of the room, not quite taking hold just yet.

"…Hey," he said. He attempted a friendly smile, but I watched as that plan failed miserably. It became one of those funny faces. "How are you?"

"Fine," I said.

He did manage a smile then, though it was small. "You say 'fine' a lot. But that's fine." I watched as he sort of moved forward before quickly pulling himself back. "Can I come in?"

"Yes."

He nodded and entered my room. He contemplated standing, his eyes on the spot beside me on the bed. "Sit," I told him, irritated. Irritated because he had told me that when I had finally confronted him on the couch, and because we hadn't moved much further from where we were then. I didn't have patience for his petty indecisions; any I had stored would be needed for more important things, for more important moments.

He gave me a hesitant look, but Naruto sat. I didn't look at him, but I knew he was playing with his thumbs without really looking at them, glancing at the carpet without really seeing it. Staring into space. "How did we get here?" he finally asked, voice conveying that futile resignation. He ran a hand through his hair and smoothed his shirt. "Please believe me when I say I know this hasn't been easy for you…but it hasn't exactly been easy for me."

I nearly laughed at that, at the triteness of his words. Instead I glared. "You don't know anything," I said.

Beside me, Naruto sighed. "I'm not going to fight with you…You don't even fight. No, that's the worst part. You do fight. You just stand there, but you're always fighting with me." The typical silence, like a piece of luggage, sat between us. I wanted to be mad at him for saying such things to me, but I couldn't. He was right. "You know what I find funny? No one knows me like you do. You. You, of all people. I've thought about that a lot. I've been thinking about it, about what it means and all that. About what it means about me, too, I guess."

I noticed, absent-mindedly, that the shadows in my room had deepened just slightly. It seemed appropriate. He continued.

"I think I knew for a long time…how you felt about me. You think you're good at hiding it," he laughed a little, "but you aren't. Any idiot could put the pieces together." There was a broken smile in his voice as he added, "Maybe I've always known. I just keep remembering your face when you first came to see me at the hospital. Sure, you don't have very many expressions as is, but that day you slipped. That day I was happy—you don't even know how happy, because you were happy to see me. You made sense. Out of all the craziness and the emptiness, you made sense. It sounds weird to say, but you sort of fixed some of that craziness and filled some of that emptiness. Even when things are crazy, even now, right now, I'm happy…because you're here." He paused. "You think I don't know how I feel, but you're wrong." He turned to face me and I met his staid, sapphire eyes. "You're wrong, Gaara. I'm not confused. I mean, I was, yeah, I was…but I'm not now."

The seriousness in his face scared me a little, but I brushed it aside, asking, tiredly, "Do you even know what you're saying?"

"I'm saying that I like you."

"…What?" I could feel the balance in the room tip. My eyes had widened a little, and it took me a while to remember how to make it so that my face revealed nothing. No, I couldn't remember.

"I like you, Gaara."

"No, you don't." It didn't sound as definite, as forceful as I'd wanted it to. Regardless, Naruto frowned, staring at me wordlessly for a small span of time. At one point, I had to look away so that when he stood, I thought he was going to leave. He didn't. He came to stand directly in front of me so that I had to look up at him, as usual. When he brought his hands up to rest gently on my face, I did not protest. I only said, "You'll regret this later."

"I won't," Naruto said.

I could feel my face softening, the anger, the frustration, the constant need to push against him dissipating. For a moment there, he became the center of the room. Maybe the center of everything. Until Kankurou came bustling in, throwing everything out of whack, as he usually did.

"Yo—" he said, freezing as he saw us. Naruto glanced at him, his hands falling to his sides nonchalantly as if our positions had been completely normal. His expression was the same one that had adorned his face when Ino had come upon us on the back porch. "Uh…Yeah," Kankurou continued. "I was just gonna let you know that I got a call, so I'm going to be at work for a few hours." Awkward silence. "So I'll catch you later then," he said, fumbling by the door for a second, before seeming to say _to hell with it_ as he left.

As the front door slammed shut on the main level, the sound carrying up through the floorboards, Naruto turned toward me with a quasi-shrug of sorts. "Well," he said resignedly, "I'll be in my room." As usual, that broken, heartbreaking smile. Then—nothing, as I listened to his footsteps, one and then the next, on the stairs.

I sat in that very spot for a long time.

What he said was not an invitation. It was not, "I'll be in my room if you need me, which of course (wink-wink) you will," just as it was not, "I'll be in my room and I expect you there within the next five minutes." In fact, Naruto did not expect me. He left me with the disturbing impression that he did not expect anything from me anymore. He had tried, he had bared it all. He had told me everything. What more was there to do? Nothing. All of this, and nothing. When all along I had wanted nothing, why now did I feel that twisting up of everything inside of me, that terrible shifting and rattling of parts?

Naruto had given up. For the first time ever, he had actually given up on me. I had never understood the phrase, but now I could see what "earth-shattering" meant. I sat there, and I continued to sit there so that it was after four when I moved.

The house had fallen into one of those deadly quiets not even punctuated by the occasional groan of breathing walls. Oddly enough, my steps were quiet on the stairs. I soon found myself standing at the top of another, smaller set of stairs—the stairs leading down to the spare bedroom—the spare bedroom where Naruto was. Or maybe he had left. Or maybe I was trying to manufacture the perfect excuse not to go down there. Because if I went down there, everything would change. Everything.

Although, everything had been in the process of changing for a very long time. And how much courage must it have taken him to tell me those things, to tell me he liked me even if he really didn't. No, he did. Naruto did like me. He was not some child unaware of his feelings and prone to misreading them. To think I had done all that I could to prevent this moment—not for myself but for him. Because I wanted to do things right. Because I didn't want him to get hurt, least of all because of me. And yet, here he was—hurt—and most certainly because of me. This was not what I had wanted. Whether I liked it or not, his pain was also mine. There wasn't too much of my life that wasn't, in some way or another, intimately linked with him. It was frustrating as all hell sometimes. Sometimes. But most of the time, I was happy about that. Because Naruto made me happy, even if he thought he was funnier than he was, and possessed the unique ability to embarrass me in public places, and wore boxers with cartoon panda bears on them. Even if he forgot about me…Just being there, Naruto made me happy. Granted, it was a skewed type of happiness—one that didn't come with a smile or a laugh or a cheerful sigh, but it was happiness, nonetheless.

I felt this strange, fluttering happiness, like a bird's wings, as I walked down those steps. Fluttering, I suppose, because I was nervous, horribly nervous. Fantastically nervous. Terrifically so. Yes, terrifically. It was terrifying. I was terrified.

Naruto's door was cracked open slightly, and I dug my toes into the tan carpet before I knocked—another diminutive method of delay.

"Yeah," Naruto called from inside, voice sounding faraway, distant. I guessed that he was in the middle of something and thought it was someone else at his door. I was right. He was reading when I came in, his body half-tilted toward me as he hurried to finish a sentence. It was one of my books—when on earth had he obtained it? It had to have been earlier when I was sleeping. So he had been in my room. It was hot in his, light spearing in from two windows near the ceiling. The room itself was tidy for the most part, his outfit from the previous day located in various places on the floor. He turned toward me with a welcoming smile that faltered as soon as he saw me. He most definitely did not expect me. A question formed itself in his eyes, and I could see a weariness there, a sort of _Why would you torture me like this so soon?_ He tried to conceal it, but failed.

"Interesting book," he said eventually. "I hope you don't mind that I borrowed it." I saw that he was about to embark on a diatribe regarding the text, but he stopped, studying me momentarily. "Did you need something?"

I backed up against the door to close it, giving him a measured look. He still did not understand. My fingers shook minutely as they rose and undid one of the buttons on my shirt and then the next. This was not part of the plan. I did not quite have a plan. Maybe it was best not to have a plan for such things. I can't even say with much assurance that I knew what I was doing or what I expected to happen. I simply knew that something would happen. As the last button was undone and I slipped my shirt off, dropping it to the floor, he understood. His face was very serious as I padded over to him, and mine was too as I stopped in front of him, much like he had earlier with me, so that he was looking up at me with those tired blue eyes. I don't know what he saw in my face, my own eyes, but he frowned and circled his arms around my lower back, pulling my hips toward him so that he buried his face in my stomach and held me tight. I felt something then, a sudden urge to cry which I dispelled with a deep breath. My hands slowly rose so that they hovered behind Naruto's back temporarily, before resting on his upper arms, before that was not enough and they smoothed around his shoulders so that I bent over and embraced him. We seemed made for each other, the way he so easily fit into my arms, my chin resting on his head so that my hair was in front of my eyes. Any trepidation seemed to rise off my skin and evaporate so that all that was left was the intensity of my emotions, and the rising swell of his.

I felt Naruto's face move, like it had on my neck, so that his lips were very clearly pressing against my belly. His arms shifted and I pulled back so that my hands sat gently on his shoulders. Glancing up at me again, our eyes locked, and he pulled my hips forward again so that I took a step and my knee knocked against the chair he sat in. He spread his legs a little so that I came to kneel on the seat of the chair, his fingers cupping my sides.

"Do you like me?" he asked, the suggestion of a smile tilting his lips. I couldn't exactly manage a glare, moving one of my hands so that it rested on his neck, my thumb brushing over his jaw. His skin was warm; I could feel the faint beat of his heart beneath my palm. He smiled. "I see."

I bent down faintly, as it was practical for me to be the one to move in such a position, and paused an inch or so in front of his face. He had one last chance to say no, to stop this before anything significant happened. He seemed to know what I was thinking, what I was offering, and I watched him contemplate it. Not once did his eyes leave mine. We seemed frozen like that, until he moved, bringing our faces even closer, our lips just barely touching but not yet meeting, until I closed the space and fulfilled the kiss. Again, there was that carefulness, and there was also a certain awareness. Awareness of his hands on my waist, of my knees between his legs but a safe distance from his crotch. Awareness that he might only want to kiss, and a more humble awareness that that would be okay. But most of all, a keen awareness of him, of his warm hands moving up to hold my face as the systematic shifting of faces began, as he pulled his face away and looked at me before kissing me again, as one kiss turned into two, three, ten, until I stopped counting. There was also an element of shyness at first as we both tried to figure out _what exactly is okay?_—as our lips met as if for the first time, each time. I was the one who screwed that up.

An attempt to reposition myself resulted in one of my knees sliding right into him—not forcefully but with enough pressure to be problematic. Though, any sort of pressure there at all probably would've been problematic. A little noise sounded from the back of Naruto's throat, and he pulled his mouth from mine. He gave me a very strange look then, a cross between contemplation and frustration—contemplative frustration; frustrated contemplation—before I attempted to move my knee, surprised to find one of his hands on the small of my back, keeping me there. His other hand curled around my neck so that he pulled me in for another kiss, his lips closing over my upper lip so that I felt his tongue. His kisses were different after that, but with a ghostly familiarity. There was a certain dominance to his kisses, but there was also an underlying deference, a sense that I was free to take over whenever I liked. But I liked him kissing me like that. That had not changed. The slowness of his lips, his tongue—the wet friction as his mouth moved from my mouth to my jaw to my neck where I had to close my eyes because what he was doing felt so good. I let out a shaky breath, and Naruto moved to kiss me again and I moved to reach him before realizing that this setup was not quite working.

He realized this, too. I watched him pull back, pushing me back just slightly so that I was standing, so that he could stand. He smiled at me when our faces were level, and I looked back at him blankly until he gripped my shoulders and took a step forward, so that I had to take a step backward, then another, all the while Naruto smiling and saying, "Back, back, back," with each step as he walked me over to the bed. I glared at some point, and he laughed, especially when the back of my knees hit the bed so that I had no choice but to sit down on it. Until I slipped my fingers into the front of his jeans and pulled him closer. He stopped laughing then. But still, there was that fond smile.

"You make the funniest faces," he said. "I love them." He continued to stand there, considering his next move, before I decided to help him. I brought my hands up and under his shirt so that I touched his skin. But that was all. He still had time to turn and run, for he was making that face again, that blur of contemplation and frustration, eyebrow cocking in a mildly-playful expression which seemed to ask, _Is this what you wanted?_, as he tugged his shirt up and over his head. There was enough confidence—enough _cockiness_ in his face for me to know that he wasn't simply doing it because I had wanted it, but because he also wanted to.

Then things got really awkward, or should I say really annoying, as Naruto placed a hand onto my chest, leaning me back onto the bed before he gripped my shoulders and slid me back just a fraction as he climbed over me, grinning stupidly and scooting me back, back, back until my head fell on a pillow. His hands and knees were on either side of mine so that he loomed over me. He looked at me differently then. He looked at me with the knowledge that we were not just going to kiss, were we?, and so maybe he should put a stop to things. For a moment there, he looked at me as if I didn't know that this was so, before I could see the recollection that, oh yes, we had done this before. I loved to read him. I loved him. Yes…I loved him. Still. Again. Yes. He watched me for a small span of time, and then he traced both of my lips before leaning down and kissing me.

His hands began then to roam, to explore—never crossing the invisible line which seemed to exist above my bellybutton. Careful. But the touch seemed to set something off balance. Touching me seemed to ignite something in him that I felt in his kiss—a certain need. And I could feel that need intensify as I brought my hands up—one splaying on his back and the other beginning at his cheek and ending in his hair, because I had to touch him, because it didn't feel right if I didn't. He began kissing me very deeply, in a slow, concentrated, and sexually-frustrating manner. Frustrating, yes. Very. Especially when I felt the raw need to have him close, and closer. There still seemed to be an invisible barrier between us, as Naruto seemed to be very careful not to let his legs touch mine, or at least not for too long, and he still kept his hands in "safe" places.

Again, I ruined that. It was hot, and his skin was hot, and the hand on his back slipped so that my fingers slipped into the back of his jeans. I felt him tense slightly, wondering if he was going to up and run now, but he didn't. Instead, his hands finally crossed that line. His lips moved down to my neck again, and it was I who tensed when I felt his fingers on my jeans, his hands as they unfastened my pants, and my heart as it began to race. He pulled back then, shrugging my jeans off with a smile and dropping them beside the bed. I watched him take ahold of one of my feet, not bothering to hide my irritation as he wiggled my big toe. He saw my face and laughed softly, crawling up alongside me and brushing a few strands of hair away from my face. He ignored my boxers, but they remained a fact between us. So did the fact that I was aroused, and that he was too. Even with his jeans on, I could tell. And I knew how frustrating that could be. So, very cautiously and with that principal awareness, I reached my fingers out and onto his jeans. His smile somewhat waned, but his blue eyes were locked onto mine. He never did break eye contact as I undid his zip, making sure not to touch him—making sure of that, because we had still not exactly done anything. Not yet. He moved closer to me then, so that our faces were on the same pillow, and I closed my eyes as one of his hands traced the features of my face—the movement exciting and peaceful at the same time. Every once in a while, his lips pressed against mine with that careful, tender pressure, but nothing really happened until I realized that his other hand had moved into my boxers with more confidence than there had been the last time.

I opened my eyes then—uncertainty, I'm sure, revealed plainly in my gaze, but Naruto was the epitome of coolness. I couldn't quite handle it as he took me in his hand. Again, there was that urge to curl up, but I couldn't quite do that, and when his hand began to move, my face fell forward so that it slanted under his chin. He was warm, but I didn't care. I needed that closeness, and maybe he did too, because his free arm curled around my back, pulling me even closer. I sighed against him, one of my own arms snaking past his waist so that it came up, behind, and over his shoulder. My other hand slid between us and into his pants, his boxers, so that his own hand froze as mine began to slide, slowly, up and down. Naruto made another noise in the back of his throat, and I moved my face so that I kissed his jaw, once softly, and then more deeply.

My own experience meant that I knew what to do to make someone feel good, and my skills were not lost on Naruto. But still, even with my hand in his pants and his in mine, I still felt a certain shyness, a certain nervousness. I felt like we were two teenage boys at a sleepover who touched each other for the first time—hesitantly at first, and then with more assurance. But always there is that carefulness—not because one of them might change their mind, but because human beings can be so very fragile. Naruto was fragile, and I did not want to hurt him. But I was also fragile, because I did not want him to hate me.

I started to doubt was I was doing then, what we were doing, my own hand stilling, but Naruto did not allow me much time to consider anything as he proceeded to touch me, and I pressed my shoulder into him, shuddering, my own hand moving, each driving the other. It became very heated then, not simply the room, but our movements, our contact: Naruto's grip tightening on my back, just as mine did on his shoulder. Our clinging hands, our bodies which shook and shivered, sighed. His tongue in my mouth as he kissed me, and my languid reciprocation. The warmth on my hand as Naruto came, his body jerking and his hand tightening so that I came too, soon after.

The sleepiness that descends after such a moment. The silence. The faint awareness that Naruto had removed my boxers, balling them up and cleaning me with them. I opened my eyes, and he was lying next to me, facing me with a lazy smile. I tried to glare, to focus on him, and he laughed a little, telling me to go to sleep. My eyes drifted shut, and my awareness of the room, and of him, began to fade. I felt him put an arm around me, his fingers in my hair and on my scalp. I felt his heartbeat as he moved closer so that his chest touched my forehead, the steady thrum echoing in my thoughts and, later, my dreams.

/

Later on, when I awoke, there was not the certainty that there had been. There was only a sickness, a sickening awareness as I considered what we had done. I felt not affection for him, but disgust, and for myself even more disgust, as well as a deeper loathing.

It is strange how things can change, how one realizes that what had seemed like a good idea may, in fact, have been a very bad one.

Naruto's arm was still draped over me, he himself still deep in the throes of sleep. He did not stir when I slipped away from him, or when I quietly gathered my clothes that were everywhere, roughly pulling my jeans back on. I felt a bit sick then, as I realized that it was significantly darker outside, meaning that I had missed dinner—that both Naruto and I had missed dinner, and my siblings would be wondering about that.

I retreated to my room, where I remained for the rest of the night, and I was not bothered. My sleep, when it came, was troubled and erratic. I woke up several times, and I was still tired when I woke up the next morning for breakfast, but cognizant enough to know that I had to face him, and confidently. (Though what good was confidence now, after what had passed between us?)

Temari was at the stove, and she sent me a tired good morning. Kankurou was different. He sat across from me as if he was going to ask me a question even though he knew I would never answer it. After all, he had been the one to walk in on that odd moment between Naruto and me. His skepticism was nothing less than apparent.

And then he came in, Naruto, not bothering to avoid my eyes as I thought he might do. No one saw him but me at first, as he sent me a slow, calculating stare which I couldn't quite decipher. I could feel that disgust bubbling up, and I looked away, down, at my empty plate. Kankurou looked at my face and then behind him, and in my peripheral I saw Naruto smile and wave.

"Morning," he greeted, taking the seat beside me as he usually did at breakfast.

Kankurou narrowed his gaze. "Yeah…Good morning," he said slowly. Temari came to the table, dishing out eggs and bacon, and Naruto thanked her, striking up a conversation about her classes as she sat down beside Kankurou, so that I thought, Okay, this will not be very difficult; he is also willing to forget about it. And a sudden calm fell over me like a blanket, settling, slowly, around me so that the disgust began to ebb. And then I felt Naruto's hand on my upper leg, and I was very clearly _un_settled. I dropped my fork, and it clattered across the surface of my plate, three faces turning toward me as if to ask what was wrong. Including him.

"Are you okay?" Naruto asked, a subtle smirk on his face. I nearly stabbed him. My face threatened to shift into a malicious leer, but I knew that would only cause confusion for the two across from me, and they were not so stupid that they wouldn't be able to figure out what was going on at that point. So I cleared my throat and ignored him, picking up my fork and proceeding to eat. Naruto continued with the conversation, as if his hand wasn't inching up my inner thigh, fingers pressing so that, to my own mute embarrassment, I felt my body beginning to respond. He was not going to let me forget.

I nonchalantly took hold of his hand under the table and moved it, and he let me move it, but he would not let go of my hand after that. He talked and talked like he always did at breakfast. Like his fingers weren't threading through mine, his thumb rubbing slow circles against the back of my hand. Like he wasn't aware that I was turned on. Oh, he was aware. He was most certainly aware. I could see it in his smirk that never quite faded for the duration of the meal. Goddamn him.

I had never felt so relieved when Temari stood, gathering everyone's plates, because that meant Naruto had to let go of my hand, which he did. And _that _meant I could leave without incident—or without further incident, as it would be more appropriate to say. Naruto followed me, as I knew he would, which was good, because it meant that I could tell him off (quietly) for his little stunt at the table, and that it was not funny _at all_, and that what had transpired on the previous afternoon would not be happening again in any way, shape, or form.

As I entered my room, I turned to begin my tirade, but it was cut short, preemptively, as Naruto shut the door behind him and came to me, taking my face in his hands and kissing me, hard. I pushed against him, and he brought me around so that my back was against the wall. It did not seem possible, but my brain was registering that his fingers were on my jeans, so that I did not quite realize what was happening until both my pants and boxers were around my feet and I felt his hands on me, remembering, mimicking what I had done to him. My mouth fell away from his after that, my forehead resting against his chest and arms secured around his back, all the while my mind buzzing with the realization that this was exactly what he wanted. He most certainly was not going to let me forget.

I came very fast, sighing violently against his chest and sort of heaving toward him, but he held me. And then he angled my face upward so that he could kiss me, slowly, and I let him, because what else could I do? I closed my eyes as he took my tongue into his mouth, until something like a moan passed through my lips even though I _never_ moaned.

Naruto pulled back then, and I fixed him with a glare, but the expression was pointless.

"I'll see you later," he said with a seductive smirk, opening and then closing the door behind him.

I stood there, stunned, trying to figure out what had just transpired. What had just…What? As soon as I glanced down at my pants, I was angry. Stepping out of them, I picked them up and tore at them, as if trying to rip them apart. When that didn't work, I threw them across the room, grabbed a towel, and stomped off to the shower.

The shower. The one place where I could stay calm and think. _Think_. Where I could rid myself of evidence of what we had just done. Where I could rid myself of him. Where I could take a deep breath and think, Okay, so this is the situation. Except that I could not quite articulate what that situation was.

Naruto left for the afternoon so that I was able to sit peacefully in the kitchen and read. Well, at least I _tried_ to read. I just kept drifting off, staring into space. I was staring into space when Temari walked in, carrying a bag of groceries.

"What is it?" she asked, sitting the bag on the table.

"Nothing," I replied, to which she somewhat smiled, placing a hand on my shoulder. "What?" I said, confused by her behavior, but she just shrugged, that smile still on her face.

"Nothing."

Later, much later, when I had turned off my light and slid under a thin blanket, I heard someone at my door. Correction: I heard him at my door, and I knew it was him. It was like I could sense him, like some part of my awareness was attuned to him. It was damn annoying.

Quietly, he opened the door, closing it and walking until he stood beside me.

"Are you still awake?" he whispered.

"Yes," I said, irritation nothing less than apparent. I heard him moving, disturbed to realize that he was undressing, before I felt him crawl onto the bed, and then over me, so that he occupied the space beside me. "What are you doing?"

"What do you think I'm doing?" There was a smile in his voice, as if he knew I was glaring at him even though he probably couldn't make me out too well. I felt his hand land of my arm and grope around until he felt my face. "Aha," he said. "There you are. And glaring, just as I expected."

"What do you want?"

"Can't I spend time with you?" His innocence was feigned. Even then, there was an underlying sincerity.

"You did," I said flatly. "Earlier."

Naruto laughed. "Yeah. Sorry about that—well, I'm not really sorry. I just wasn't going to let you get away with anything this time. I know how you are. Although, you weren't exactly complaining." My glare darkened as I pulled away from his hand, rolling so that I was no longer facing him. I heard Naruto chuckle as he moved closer to me, slipping an arm around my waist so that we were spooning. His warm breath brushed against the back of my neck as he moved his face even closer. "Hey," he said.

"_What?_"

"I like you." Naruto pressed a soft kiss to my neck, so that, even though I felt the urge to pull away from him, I could feel myself moving back toward him. He nuzzled his face against my hair, saying something about how I smelled good, before pressing even closer to me, the heat from his body radiating against my back. His hand searched and then found mine, weaving our fingers together. I looked back toward him and felt his lips at the corner of my mouth, slightly missing the mark before they fell again on mine. I closed my eyes, unable to see anything anyway, and my mind focused on Naruto as he pulled back shortly, before leaning in to kiss me again—slow, punctuated touches that persisted until he snuggled his face into my shoulder. I heard his tired-but-content sigh, and even as he drifted asleep, his body relaxing, his fingers remained firmly linked with my own.

/

Our relationship after that can really only be characterized in one word: volatile.

During those last fourteen days of winter break, I think there were only two in which we didn't do something either implicitly or explicitly sexual. Because there were ways of doing both, as I came to find out. It was predominantly physical between us, but driven largely by an assortment of emotions that collected and dispersed, some bouncing off of others but all of them driven by a magnetic urgency. It was not easy to explain—least of all to myself.

Anything and everything would set it off. It didn't matter if I had just come out of the shower and he was about to get in, because when our eyes met it was all over. In five seconds or less he had me up against the cool tile, hands unfastening my towel and pressing against me. It didn't matter if I was leaning against the foot of the bed on the phone, and Naruto came in to ask me a question, opting to wait—laying on the floor like a little kid and tracing the veins on my feet. I watched him until he felt my eyes and looked up, and suddenly he was crawling between my legs and pressing his mouth against my mouth. There was even a time when Naruto was downstairs on the couch reading, and I was sitting on the floor by his leg, so that when I leaned back, my face rested against him. Naruto's fingers played in my hair, and when I turned toward him, he sent me a soft smile, and there was something about that smile, something which I wanted, something which led me to undo his pants and take him into my mouth, feeling his fingers threading into my hair, so that Naruto was not the only one to blame.

There was something almost electric between us, something that caused us to react to one another, and to set each other off. But it was not entirely sexual. At first I thought it was merely a fascination, mere gratification, only to steadily learn that there was more to it—something else. Even when we weren't fooling around, something seemed to resonate between us, livening with a look or a touch. And there was something else—a warmth. Something like a sigh, something that made my pulse quicken simply by looking at him. Something that caused me to grip his shirt as he walked past me, so that he thought something was wrong. "Hey, what is it?" he had asked, taking my hand into his. When I said nothing, he pulled me into his arms. I came to know him almost as well as I knew myself, but in some deeper, metaphysical way. I knew the feel of his body pressing into mine when I woke up, and how his face would rest in the crook of my shoulder. How he would come up behind me and hug me. I knew his hands, his lips, his voice, where he liked to be kissed (his face), and his sensitivities (his shoulders and hips). And he knew me just as well.

But that was the extent of it. Every time I would start to think that it was over, there he would be, giving me that look again. We never did do anything more than that, which meant that we never had sexual intercourse. And we never discussed the situation, because I would not permit it. He looked at me very hard one night as we lay in my room, the area lit only by the light of the moon, and he asked me what we were.

"We can't," I muttered, tracing the outline of his body with my eyes. The light played off his skin beautifully, even though I knew every inch of him by heart. He looked sad.

"Why can't we?" he asked, solemnly.

I started to shake my head, to come up with some other excuse, but he pulled me against him and kissed me. He kissed me a lot during those last two weeks. Those last two weeks—both pleasant and painful. Painful, because the clocks wouldn't stop, and with each round of the second hand, we were drawn closer to the return and to the end. The end of whatever this was. Because there were our friends. And there was Sakura. People who would never understand. I found myself wanting to spend more and more time with him, but carefully concealing it with endless excuses. Always some kind of excuse. Of course, he saw through them all.

We went on errands, picking up groceries and other miscellaneous items for Temari and Kankurou. I know they had figured out what was going on. We weren't disappearing all the time and at the same time for no good reason. But they didn't ask me about it, and they didn't criticize me for it, which was their own form of a blessing, I suppose.

We started taking my car out so that I could give Naruto lessons on how to drive. This annoyed the hell out of me the most, because he was scared to death of the car at first, before he realized how to operate it, and then you couldn't get him out of the blasted thing. I had to hide the keys when I came out one morning to find him doing circles in the backyard because he "thought it was cool," all the while Kankurou cussing him out about how it would take days for all of the dust to settle. He certainly looked apologetic, but I saw Naruto bite his lip to conceal his smile, and I realized that I could never hate him. Even when Sakura called, I couldn't hate him. Even when there were those days when we could not help but be away from one another for a few hours, when he had to help Kankurou with a car, and I had to go into town for a book, and so I was finally alone with my thoughts and my self, thinking, What are we doing? Because it was not simply him, just as it was not simply me.

It was the worst when I was away from him. But I would have to start getting used to it. All of this would stop when we got back. "We" would be over. Over and done with. The thought sickened me and made me hate myself for engaging in acts that I would only look back on with resentment and a great degree of pain later.

After I returned from such moods, which became increasingly more frequent during the seven grueling days of that last week, Naruto merely had to look at my face, and he would drop whatever he was doing and hold me. It did not matter if he was helping Kankurou when I stepped out of the car, or if he was aiding Temari in dinner prep as I walked through the front door. He held me right in front of them, even when I told him angrily to let go, even going so far as to try and shove him away, which was all an elaborate (or maybe not so elaborate) pretense, because by that point, we both knew he wouldn't, and we both had an idea that "Let me go" was really code for "Please don't let me go. Ever."

/

It was the day before our return flight, a mild Thursday evening, when Naruto asked if we could take the car out for one last spin. I told him I didn't care.

I grabbed the keys from my desk, extending them toward Naruto when we were outside, and when he took them, his hand closed over mine so that when I looked at him, I thought, He's going to kiss me, because he hadn't yet that day. We had been busy packing, and so we didn't really see one another except for the occasional passing in the hall or in the kitchen. We had eaten at different times too, operating on our own schedules, so that it really had felt like forever since I had last seen him, which was problematic. I was supposed to be acclimating to life without him, rather than feeling troubled whenever he wasn't around.

When he didn't kiss me, I figured that he was allowing things to go back to normal, that he was finally understanding that this really wasn't going to work, and that he might even be driving me somewhere to tell me that this was all a mistake. Which I would understand. As awkwardly painful as it would be, I would understand that.

We spoke very little in the car. Naruto made some idle comment about being a great driver, but there was really nothing for me to say to that. There was really nothing for me to say.

I thought he was cruising aimlessly until I saw the house, surprised but not _that_ surprised when he pulled the car off the road. He steered clear of the debris, showcasing some annoyingly-impressive maneuverability skills, before pulling the car to the side of the house where it could not be seen from the road, and parking it there. I glanced at him, but he stared straight ahead, hands draped by his sides on the seat. Even from such an angle, I could see his face flickering between contemplation and frustration. He was going to ask me something, and it could've been anything, a question of what would happen next, of what we were, of what he was supposed to do. Whatever it was, I said, "Don't."

He turned toward me with a curious smile and asked, "Are you psychic?" I frowned and turned away, looking out into the deepening dusk, and the stars which started twinkling here and then there. "Gaara," he placed his hand nearest me over my own hand nearest him. I did not like it when he said my name like that. "You know we have to talk."

"No, we don't," I said flatly. He laughed, and when I attempted to pull my hand away, he firmly held it in place.

"Don't get mad," he said softly.

"I'm not mad." I felt him squeeze my hand, and when I looked at him, he had that helpless look on his face. I could've smacked him. Instead, I leaned my head against his arm, and he wrapped that arm around my shoulders, pulling me toward him, until we both realized that seatbelts did not make things very feasible. He unstrapped us both, ignoring my glare that meant I was perfectly capable of un-strapping myself.

"Come here," he said.

"Where?"

My car was not some boat of a car possessing extensive space. It was not meant to be crawled around in, which is exactly what Naruto expected as he looked at me and said, again, "Come here."

Sighing audibly, I climbed over the drink holder between us, Naruto grasping my upper arm and pulling me onto his lap so that I sat facing him, my legs on either side of his.

"Isn't this better?" he asked, a teasing smile on his face. I made to move away from him, but he gripped my waist, his hands sliding under my shirt and onto my bare skin. It was certainly not to my advantage that he now had no qualms about touching me. Or perhaps it was. His hands smoothed up my sides and over my back, as I rested my own hands on his shoulders.

"We shouldn't," I said.

He made a strange face. "Shouldn't we?"

I was frowning even as he pulled my face down to his, his lips meeting mine always with that initial carefulness, that primary caution. As always, a heartbreaking tenderness there, in his fingertips and his mouth. Even when his kisses were not so chaste anymore, no longer so careful, though not careless. Always, his lips moved to my neck, where he brushed the collar of my shirt aside—where he decided to take off my shirt altogether. I ran my fingers through his soft hair, and he looked up at me with one of his funny faces.

"Can we?" he asked, and I hesitated. Almost instantly, I knew what he was referring to, and I suppose, to some degree, I expected it. But I was still surprised to hear him ask.

"We can't," I told him.

"We have."

I looked down toward his lap. "Yes."

"Yes, we have? Or yes, we can?" And then his hands were on my face, and he was looking at me with a concerned expression. "We don't have to…"

"Yes," I said quietly. "We can."

Naruto didn't smile or reveal any sense of triumph. He held me. There was something in his arms, something I was getting used to. A feeling of safety; a feeling of a home away from home. It was me who was starting to feel as if I might be helpless without him.

I pulled away from him so we could get all the awkward, preliminary stuff over and done with. Getting my pants off was the hardest part—never mind getting his pants off. Naruto laughed periodically the whole time, dispelling a little more of that awkwardness each time he looked at me and asked, "I have to do that?" And I glared at him each time, even though he always ended up saying, "No, let me do it." He knew my body now, and equally well. He was not embarrassed.

Regardless of how it's portrayed in the movies, it's extremely hard to have sex in a car. He stayed in the driver's seat, so that I had to lower myself onto him so we could do it that way. It was different this time, because it had been a long time. I had almost forgotten what it was like. I had also not been able to see Naruto's face last time. This time I was facing him, and so I saw it all. I saw his face sort of screw up, almost as if in pain as I gradually pressed down on him, and he progressively inched into me. I had to pause several times at first, because it really had been a long time and so this time was not without the usual pain, but it was also not unbearable. Naruto definitely helped things as I felt his lips press against my neck and then behind my ear.

"You're beautiful," he whispered.

I chose to ignore that, opting, instead, to move. There was still a sense of discomfort, but it was dulled, almost like it was not exactly happening to me. I started slightly when he pulled me toward him so that it was Naruto burying his face in the crook of my neck, which was usually what I ended up doing to him. In such a position, he was reaching me in new and different places, which was unexpected because I had meant it to be mostly for him. The car was warm and fogged with our breath, so that anyone who saw the car could figure out what was going on inside. But that possibility was distant. I focused immediately on Naruto, on his hands, on his nails which pressed into my shoulder. On his breath, slow, and then quick, labored. On my name, which he kept saying, differently each time, again, and again, and again, until I came, vaguely aware that Naruto was also coming, his body trembling beneath me. He slumped forward against me, and I singularly voted that it would be his undershirt that was utilized for cleaning purposes this time.

I did let him stay like that, his arms circled around me, for a little while. Eventually we both realized that we needed to clean up, and so we went about the usual mode of wiping up—something we were anything but new to at this point. I was looking him over when he pulled me into his arms, reaching into the back seat and grabbing a blanket, which he pulled around us. It was getting a little bit chilly with the sequence of night, as it usually did in La Suna. I wavered, and then I gave in, leaning against him only to find his arms holding me under the blanket.

"We'll take a shower together later," Naruto said, giving me an amicable squeeze, which pulled a dubious glance from me.

"Is that all you think about?" I asked, tone only slightly incredulous.

He gave me a funny face, asking, "What?" before realization set in, and he blushed. "I didn't mean it like that," he laughed, nudging me. "Your mind went there, not mine."

"I wonder why."

He chuckled again and pressed a kiss to the top of my head, too tuckered out to have a false argument with me. I rolled the window down, and we listened to the sounds of night as they floated into the car, to the crickets and to the wolves—the latter far off—and to the wind.

I felt Naruto move, one of his hands leaving the warmth of the blanket so that he could trace the various attributes of my face—eyebrows, nose, eyes, mouth—an eccentric little habit he was apt to do. His face was lit with a fond smile.

"It's over, isn't it," I stated more than asked.

Naruto bit his lip and looked out the window before meeting my eyes. "Is it?" he asked.

I glared at him and looked away. "Very funny."

"We should try it."

I faced him again, noting the seriousness to his face that sometimes found its way there. "Do you even know what you're saying?" I asked him, tiredly, not even sure if I knew what he was saying or what he was suggesting, and a little scared that I might be wrong—scared, too, if I was right.

"You always ask me that. Of course I know what I'm saying. Do you?" I nearly rolled my eyes, meaning—point taken. His fingers were cold as they ghosted over my cheek, settling there, but I didn't mind. "I don't remember a lot—almost nothing, really—but I know how I feel right now, about you. And it's not because I remembered your name, or because of what happened before and all that, or maybe it is, a little…" He stopped, embarrassed—a fact I was aware of, because whenever he bit his cheek like that, like he was doing now, it meant he was feeling self-conscious. He said, "I care about you, Gaara. I like being around you. I like being with you." What did it mean? What was he saying? I contemplated questions like these as he looked at me very seriously and said, "So we should try it."

I had this funny feeling that if I said yes, I would never get rid of him. Ever. An even funnier feeling was just how close I came, for the first time in a long time, to smiling.

/

It was hard to leave La Suna, to leave Temari and Kankurou—it always was. But I knew I would be back. They looked a lot more confident that I would be all right, that they wouldn't have to worry as much as they usually did about me, and about him. He gave them both a hug at the airport, which completely disarmed them both, so that I could see a younger version of my sister as she yelled at him and told him that he was not to do that again, and a less guarded version of my brother as he stood there, his arms drawn up in his total lack of expectancy where such gestures were concerned. It seemed to break something down in them, because they then came and each gave me a hug, so that I was left to awkwardly pat each of their backs as Naruto smiled warmly at me from behind them.

Because the blond idiot had kept me awake all night, I fell asleep on the plane, which was beneficial because then I didn't have to consider what I had agreed to on the previous night, and how Naruto still might change his mind. How he had not seen Sakura in quite some time, and didn't distance make the heart grow fonder? But I was prepared for this, and I think, to some extent, this is what I expected.

I woke up to the sound of the flight attendant's voice overhead, telling us we would be landing soon. I was surprised to find Naruto's arm around me, rubbing my arm, and my head tilted onto his shoulder, even with the old woman one row ahead who kept looking back at us over her glasses.

"I think she's jealous," Naruto said, sending her an amicable grin, and I pulled away from him with the usual glare. I was a little surprised that he didn't seem to possess any shame—though in a perfect world there would be none—but I decided that it was because the plane was not yet the university. We were still stuck in a warped sort of middle ground where we were, in many ways, safe.

I could feel the difference immediately on the ground. There was a space between us at the airport and in Shikamaru's car when he picked us up, though perhaps I was largely responsible for that. Naruto talked to him the whole time, telling him how great the break was and how amazing it was in La Suna. His emphatic inquiries were answered in the usual, apathetic manner by Shikamaru. At some point, Naruto began talking to me, to both of us, and when I ignored him, he proceeded to poke me in the side until I slapped his hand away and told him to stop it.

Shikamaru started looking at us very strangely after that, even if it was in his own, indifferent way. Especially when we got to the apartment, and I exited the car on Naruto's side, not expecting him to grasp my arm and help me out, his other hand pressing gently against my lower back. I sent him a warning look, which he ignored, hands moving away from me so he could lean into the open passenger window and say goodbye. I could hear Shikamaru mention something about a party, and when he drove off, Naruto told me that we would be going to another get-together, a new-year kickoff type of thing.

"You can't be serious," I said.

"Don't I look serious?" he asked, little chuckles escaping as he tried in vain to look serious. "Besides," his face relaxed into a lopsided grin, "it'll be fun."

I regarded him in silence before looking away. "Is Sakura going?"

Naruto sighed. "I would imagine."

"I really don't think it's a good idea—"

"Why not? You know what? Never mind. Executive decision—we're going. We're both friends with her," he said, opening the door to the apartment. I wondered if she knew that, or if Naruto would make it clear. He still had yet to see her—everything might change.

We put our things away in relative quiet, and I started thinking that maybe, just maybe, I wouldn't be moving out just yet. That is, until we got to the party. Again, there was an element of difference, of distance, when Kiba picked us up to take us over to his house where the event was located. The afternoon had been filled with Naruto's voice as he returned missed calls and caught up with everyone. We had very little interaction. I mulled over Naruto's words, finding numerous ways of interpreting them. What did he mean when he said we should "try it"? He had used similar terms when he suggested we sleep together some odd years ago, and we saw how swimmingly _that_ went. Did "try" mean wholeheartedly, or half-assed? Did it mean we were public? Exclusive? What?

I thought about all this again in Kiba's car. Kiba was not Shikamaru, and so that meant that Naruto didn't play around with me as he had earlier. I was quiet on the way over, but that fact was nothing out of the ordinary. But still, Naruto kept watching me. I could feel his eyes on me the whole time. That alone seemed to reassure me in some arbitrary way, even though I had thought it would accomplish the opposite.

There were the usual greetings at the door and inside, as people gathered around Naruto and me. I began to get annoyed when they asked him questions about Sakura that they expected him to know—Where was she? How was she? Had they spent any time together over break?—and so I slipped away from the group unnoticed. But of course there was that expectation. What did I expect? What _did_ I expect?

Kiba called me over to the living room where the usual group was steadily gathering together on couches. Ino, Shikamaru, and even Hinata were there, all of them sending me their own idiosyncratic greeting. I sat down in the seat adjacent to Ino, who told me that I looked different.

"Different how," I asked listlessly.

She tilted her head and smiled, even going so far as to shrug. "Different," she said again. "Just different."

"Man, I was thinking that myself," Kiba chimed in. "But it's definitely a good different. Not like you were bad before or anything," all the while Ino nodding emphatically, "but you look…I don't know, happier?"

"Exactly," Ino agreed. "He _does _look happier." To me: "You do."

"…Happier," I said slowly, eyes narrowing as I wondered just what it was about me that was giving off happy vibes. Because I was not a happy vibe person. At all.

"Ano, it's—it's not that you l-_look _happier," Hinata stuttered, pressing her hands together, "but that you _seem_ happier. Or—or something!"

And that was supposed to make me feel better?

I did not like where the conversation was headed. Suddenly everyone made it their profound interest to try and figure out just what was different about me, and what in the seven suns could make Gaara—_Gaara_, they kept saying, though I was not meant to take offense—happy, if that is what I, indeed, was?

Shikamaru gave me a look, and I almost thought he was trying to tell me something, before realizing too late that that was exactly what he was trying to do.

"Hey, Naruto," Ino said, and I heard him say, "Hello, hello," behind me. And then I felt Naruto's hands as they fell upon my shoulders, and when I turned to glare at him, there was his face, close, and then closer. "And hello," he smiled, pressing his lips to mine for a quick kiss. Everyone in our immediate vicinity shut up immediately, watching as Naruto hopped over the back of the couch, occupying the space beside me and resting his hand on my knee.

The array of expressions on everyone's faces was priceless. Absolutely priceless. But they were very careful not to say anything, or at least, not to say the wrong thing—whatever that was. I was angry for his unscripted actions (he could have at least _told_ me he was going to do that), but I was also, I don't know…happy? And I was also proud of Naruto, just a little bit, (though he'd never hear it from me), because it took guts to do that—that, and a large amount of stupidity—both of which Naruto had plenty of. I could feel the grip on my leg tighten, but to anyone else it would've been imperceptible. He was trying to stop his hand from shaking as the group stared at us in silence, and others came over to see what was up, only to see Naruto's hand on my leg and fall into their own quiet.

Ino was less subtle, and I would be eternally grateful for what she did next. Her jaw quite literally dropped as she said, and loudly, "What the f—" —(insert expletive of choice). She turned then to Kiba. "I told you, didn't I? Didn't I tell you?"

Kiba waved her off, stating that he "had known all along," way before she did anyway. Shikamaru smirked as he pulled out a cigarette, but then grimaced as Ino karate-chopped his head, berating him about how he was not going to smoke around a pregnant lady. And life moved on. Some people wanted to ask more about us, and some did, but we found surprisingly that we didn't have to answer any questions (not that I would have, mind you). When someone I didn't know asked Naruto how long "this" had been going on, Ino replied, crossly, "Uh, hello? It's been happening for a long time. Where the hell have you been?" And when someone else asked if Naruto was gay, Kiba looked at him with a leer, telling him, "So what if he is? If you have a problem with that, then get the hell out."

And that was the extent of the conversation. Naruto's hand relaxed on my knee, and I could feel him sigh. That meant he had not seen her.

I had. Disinterestedly, I excused myself, giving Naruto an _I'll-be-back_ look, and following her. She had come in right around the same time that Naruto had come up behind me, but she remained some ways away as if she knew what was going to happen. Though she had most definitely seen Naruto kiss me, I couldn't read Sakura's face as she took a step back and into a nearby room. Normally, I never would have followed her. I did not follow people. I did not care. But Naruto cared about her, and I suppose, if I was forced to admit it, I did, too, in my own minute, disinterested way. She was one of the few people who had been there from the very beginning. She had stepped in and done what I could not do.

So, aside from owing her this, I also wanted to do this.

She had her arms crossed, but she was also holding her arms so that she seemed to stand folded when I came in. The wavering glow from the gas fire sent ripples over the room, like light reflected off the surface of water. This light rippled over her face as she turned toward me and then away.

"Why did I know it would be you and not him?" she asked.

Because I didn't know what to say, mostly because I usually exempted myself from conversations like these, I said, quietly, "I'm sorry."

"Don't," she said, shaking her head. I could see that we were just a little bit alike, particularly in how we felt about Naruto. "Just…just don't apologize, okay?" She tried to smile, but abandoned the idea. "I wanted to be upset, but…but I expected this. Of course I'm surprised, but I'm not _that_ surprised. The only person he ever talks about is you." She turned to face me. "Even before, there was never any contest. That's why I almost felt thankful when he forgot everything, because it meant he forgot about you—not that it matters now. I know it's horrible; I'm horrible, but I really felt that way."

"You're not…horrible," I trailed off awkwardly. I was surprised when Sakura chuckled.

"So he's rubbed off on you, I see," she said. When I continued to stare blankly at her, she said, "You're trying to cheer me up." She saw my face and laughed again, until I realized that she was crying. "I'm sorry," she said between tears, "but it sucks. Don't get me wrong, I love you both dearly, but still…"

She sat down on the couch facing the fireplace and proceeded to cry, mumbling something into her hands about how Naruto was a "stupid idiot." I wasn't sure what to do at that point; I was not a person prone to having girls burst into tears around them. So I did what Naruto had done for me. I sat beside her and brought an arm around her. She leaned toward me, her face in her hands, and we sat like that for a short while, so that it stopped feeling awkward. I could not hate her—this girl who also had feelings for him. I had watched her grow up. We had watched each other grow up. We were friends.

"You're a really nice person, Gaara," Sakura said. "I know how much you love him."

I struggled not to glare and Sakura laughed, the door opening as Naruto walked in. He saw us and bit his lip, guilt reflected in his eyes. Sakura sat up when she saw him, looking particularly put-together at that point. Naruto stood at the door, before walking over in front of where she sat, a complex mix of expressions on his face. "I'm sorry," he said.

Sakura raised a brow, tossing a hand in the air. "Not you, too. I _definitely_ don't want to hear that from you." Her expression was especially suspicious as he sat down in the empty space beside her, but it softened as he pulled her in for a hug, and I watched as she slowly returned the gesture. "You punk."

I looked away from them, my eyes drawn toward the fire as I tried to brush away the possibility that Naruto might still change his mind about me. But that was the reality. That had always been the reality. But still.

A warm hand on my arm jolted me back into the present, and I turned toward Naruto. He was facing me over Sakura's shoulder with a small smile on his face. I glared, and he smirked, and Sakura pulled away from him, getting to her feet.

"Get a room," she said, hands on her hips but a suggestion of her own smirk gracing her lips. Naruto looked at her innocently, and she shook her head. "I swear…I'm going back out there," she nodded toward the humming din. "And you know what? I'm going to have a good time."

"Good," Naruto grinned.

Sakura stared at him, and then she looked at me, and then she laughed a little and smiled as well. "Yes, well…I'll see you." At the door, she paused, saying, "Good luck with classes on Monday, Naruto." And then she sent me a warm smile. "And you too, Gaara."

I watched her leave, listening to the sounds from the main room as they swarmed into our smaller room when Sakura opened and closed the door. I liked the subsequent not-so-quiet. I felt Naruto's hand slide across my shoulders as he gently pulled me so that my head was on his lap. Normally, I would've stopped him, but this time, I allowed it.

I found it a little strange, a little scary that we were here—that we had made it all this way. For the life of me, I still couldn't figure out exactly _how_ we had gotten here. How I had started out hating him, and now…_Now_.

"You could've warned me," I said.

Naruto knew I was talking about the kiss. "I could've," he agreed. "But where would be the fun in that?"

Glaring, I turned my face toward the fire, and Naruto tipped it back with his fingers. "Five more months," he said.

I felt my eyebrows struggling to meet. "Yes."

"Are you going to leave me?"

"What?" I said. But I knew what he was talking about. My doctorate. He had seen me applying to several Ph.D. programs; it was a fact that I might end up anywhere. He knew this. He knew this, and he was still giving me a helpless look. I could feel my frustration manifesting itself in my face, and, when I spoke, my voice. "They have a good program here," I muttered, "and they've accepted me, along with offering me a fellowship." I met his eyes with an unexpected earnestness. "I'll be here."

Naruto stared at me, silent. And then, all of a sudden, there was that fond smile. "You have no idea how deeply in like with you I am," he said.

I could feel my cheeks heating up, and a strange, quivering feeling that seemed to be born in my stomach. I could feel something within myself reaching out toward him, even as he leaned down to kiss me.

/

About him, about us, I was right. I never could get rid of him.

He was with me for the entirety of my doctorate, through the good and through the very bad times. Not surprisingly and a little annoyingly, most of the good times were with him. Like when I saw him earn his bachelor's and then his master's with that goofy, handsome smile on his face. Or when I came to his classroom to bring him his lunch which he had forgotten in my office, only to see the rapt faces of his students, their bald adoration as he explained the mechanics of oil painting. Or when, one night as I trudged into the apartment after a grueling night class, looking anything but enthusiastic, he looked at me with a small smile and told me that he loved me.

"What?" I said.

"I love you," he said with a startling clarity. "I love you."

Though it would be a while before I said it as freely as he had said it and would continue to say it, I loved him. I always had. And he knew that. That smile, that laugh. I loved it all.

When Naruto told my siblings that we were dating, I made sure to memorize their faces. Kankurou's blatant shock was a perfect complement to Temari's slack jaw. They were less surprised of the fact that we were going out than of the fact that he so freely admitted it to them. But they were happy—they were happy for me—even if Temari still yelled at him to shut up and let her cook dinner on her own for once, and even if Kankurou cussed him out if not once, then twice a day for getting into everything. It's just that Naruto loved them. And they came to love him, too.

Sure, he and I still bumped heads occasionally, but we'd argue only to end up in bed together. We even got into a fight when I told him that he wouldn't be able to have kids if he stayed with me. Of course, there were a lot of words leading up to this, but that fight was over as soon as Naruto heard this, breaking into a fantastic smile. "We can adopt," he said. I stammered out that he was crazy. He laughed and kissed me. He even held my hand in public—something which I protested. At first. I liked the feeling of my hand clasped in his, even if I scowled the whole time. I liked so much about him, it wasn't even funny. For Naruto, it was hilarious, because he had this crazy notion that he had me figured out. Which he probably had. I didn't think I would ever figure him out—not completely. But that was okay. That meant that there was always tomorrow, that I always had something to look forward to. I had him. We had each other.

Naruto never did remember anything else. There were little things, little flickers of memories that he could never quiet grasp, but that was all. And I was fine with that. I had stopped obsessing over the past. It was a beautiful memory, and it would always be—something I would always cherish—but that was all. It was the now I was concerned with, and I was sure to tell him that.

Sometimes I tried to picture what the old Naruto would think regarding what had transpired, and I could see him slumped over and upset, confused, his hands clasped tightly as he tried to understand how he could become such a person, how our relationship could change in such a way. But more often, I pictured him smiling in a silly sort of disbelief, sheer happiness shining through as I explained all that had happened. Every once in a while, his laugh would interrupt me, and though I couldn't hear it, I only had to look at him to know how thoroughly his laughter filled the air.

**"****Stand by [me]": **_The End_

* * *

**A/N:** Well, there you have it. I'm kind of sad it's over. This story has hovered around me for quite some time, and now it's finished. I struggled mostly with how it was going to end. Some of you (Ugawa) really had me thinking about whether or not I even wanted Naruto and Gaara to end up together. It took me a week to think it through. It's been fun though. I've been challenged. And I KNOW there were typos I missed (Why didn't anyone tell me there were all these misplaced "f"s in the last part? XD)

If you have a moment, please let me know what you thought. I often wonder and worry about how people see SBM in relation to AR, and maybe some of you have problems with it, which is totally fine. Either way, I really would care to know how you felt about it, especially this final part, and questions are always welcome as well. And if you've survived through to the end, then you know the drill:

Thanks for reading. (And I especially thank you for your patience with this story.) Take care!

Fun(ny) facts about AR as a whole:

- AR was hilariously close to being a song fic. The song? Emerson Hart's "I Wish the Best for You." Beautifully sad song. Do look it up if you can. The lyrics are completely applicable: "You'll learn to forget me, / And I'll try, I'll try to forget / You."

- Sasuke never once shows up in this story. That was not intentional. Actually, if I remember correctly, there was going to be a small mention of him, but it got to be a bit too wordy, so I threw it out.

- I don't know where the heck it takes place. In my mind, it was this ambiguous area, so when it came time to figure out where Gaara was going to be from and I spent hours trying to find a place where it was warm in the winter and sandy and deserty only to realize that I didn't need to use a real place…yeah…Because I had a brilliant idea that Gaara was going to be from Idaho (as a tribute to the movie, "My Own Private Idaho")…but that did not work as far as the whole warm winter thing.

- When SBM was still in the planning stages, I was considering having Naruto slowly gain his memories back over the course of the epilogue. Obviously that didn't happen.

- SBM is twice as long as AR, which I find particularly hilarious because SBM was supposed to be a short epilogue. Pfft. Yeah…(AR = 24,413 words - 48 pages total; SBM = 42,537 words – 88 pages total). About that...


End file.
